A new £2.7 million project deploying state of the art listening equipment in the Celtic Sea, to create an interactive map of marine mammal behaviour, has been launched by the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult, in partnership with Celtic Sea Power and the University of Exeter.
The three-year SubSea Soundscape project, funded by The Crown Estate's Offshore Wind Evidence and Change (OWEC) programme, aims to strengthen understanding around potential environmental interactions with future floating offshore wind turbines. The OWEC programme funds a range of research projects to de-risk and accelerate the delivery of offshore wind infrastructure, while enabling marine and coastal ecosystems to thrive.
Marie Kelly, Business Development Team Leader at ORE Catapult, said: "The SubSea Soundscape project will provide valuable insight into underwater noise conditions, and the marine mammals present in various locations across the Celtic Sea. By combining new and existing acoustic data, we will be able to establish a marine mammal and noise evidence base, informing planning and consenting decisions for floating offshore wind.
"This could be groundbreaking for floating offshore wind development in the Celtic Sea - reducing consenting times, reducing environmental impact and creating more efficient and sustainable use of the seabed."
Last October, researchers at ORE Catapult deployed 21 marine acoustic recorders at key locations, around 20km apart, across the Celtic Sea. These listening stations record and transmit a regular stream of data to memory cards housed within each station, supporting the creation of a digital map of marine mammal movements across the region.
Professor Matthew Witt, Associate Professor in the Natural Environment at the University of Exeter, said: "These 21 listening stations fitted to the seabed act like dictaphones, recording sound across a range of bandwidths, providing a rich, comprehensive picture of the underwater environment that we can't gain from other technologies such as satellites.
"This project is pivotal. Previously, lots of small-scale surveys have looked at how animals could respond to large engineering projects. However, many have failed to recognise that animals live on a large geographical scale. As wind farms increase in number and size, it's vital to assess their potential effects on the environment, at the scale of which these animals actually exist, rather than in small areas of water that they could occupy at any one time.
"By having a long-term project where we gather the data prior to large scale development, we hope to provide a strong evidence base for people to make informed decisions about how these farms could be built and how they're operated."
Crucially, the data collected will be made publicly available through the OWEC programme's Marine Data Exchange, so that developers can better understand potential interactions between marine mammals and offshore wind equipment, and regulators and statutory bodies can build an effective picture of suitable locations for development.
The use of smart technology to gain environmental data could potentially speed up consenting processes across the UK if this approach was more widely adopted. Consenting processes for major infrastructure projects like offshore wind farms are lengthy, complex and reliant on robust baseline data. The SubSea Soundscape project and wider OWEC programme aim to address existing evidence gaps and support accelerated decision making – so that the UK can move faster towards reaching offshore wind deployment targets.
Olivia Thomas, Head of Planning and Technical for Marine at The Crown Estate, said: "The OWEC programme plays a vital role in funding projects which increase the evidence base we hold on offshore wind interactions in the marine environment, enabling us to further derisk and accelerate its deployment - crucial to the UK's clean energy transition.
"The data collected by this monitoring equipment will enable us to understand more about the distribution of marine mammals in the Celtic Sea and could help inform our spatial mapping approach to future offshore wind leasing."
Neil Farrington, Strategic Offshore Development Manager at Celtic Sea Power, added: "The SubSea Soundscape project is a natural progression of the regional environmental characterisation work that Celtic Sea Power initiated in 2021. It builds on our existing bank of wind, metocean, bird and other key data and has supported development of our SealSpy capability – an acoustic classifier to detect seal vocalisations underwater."
