Data Analytics for Monitoring of Marine Life in the Tidal Power Generation Environment

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

One significant challenge for the tidal turbine industry is ensuring that their devices do not cause harm to the environment. Black Rock Tidal Power (BRTP) has a mandate to demonstrate that their turbine design is not causing harm within the region of the turbine planned for the FORCE testing site in the Bay of Fundy. Other researchers collaborating with BRTP are developing methods to sense marine life activity in the high-flow regions that will be used by tidal turbines. Sensing includes Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) and detection/tracking of acoustic tags implanted in marine life. Dalhousie's Institute for Big Data Analytics. will work with BRTP on developing data analytics that will supply an answer to the company problem. The project will consist of two main parts, (1) the Data Acquisition and Integration part, and (2) the Data Analysis part. In Data Acquisition, we will first determine what non-acoustic, environment-relevant data is the most useful for environmental impact assessment. In the Data Analytics part, we will develop the models expressing the relationship between the anthropogenic noise levels and the quantitative measures of presence of marine species for which data is available. This project will develop a key component of the required process for proper environmental assessment, which will be used immediately for the FORCE project and other related projects. The new capability will enable the larger tidal turbine development project to proceed and can also be used as leverage to encourage collaboration with other tidal energy developers and to ease approval for new projects.