Instrumentation for Monitoring around Marine Renewable Energy Converters: Workshop Final Report

Abstract

We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind and Water Power Technologies Office that enabled us to organize, conduct, and report on the outcomes of this international workshop. We are also grateful for support from BioSonics, Inc. in making the workshop a success.

Assessing the effects of tidal stream marine renewable energy on seabirds: A conceptual framework

“…This will necessitate greater interdisciplinary collaboration, as has been called for previously, especially between engineering fields (e.g. computer vision, signal processing) and ecologists (Gill 2005;Cada et al 2007;Joslin, Polagye, and Parker-Stetter 2012;Polagye et al 2014;Cotter, Murphy, and Polagye 2017;Weinstein 2018). Ultimately, local effects on individuals or groups need to be up-scaled to impacts on populations in order to be useful from a consenting and regulatory perspective (Boehlert and Gill, 2010;Roche et al, 2016;May et al, 2019).…”

“…In order to also be able to gather information on foraging behaviour, conducting focal watches from land may be a solution (Waggitt et al 2017; Figure 3). Marine radar deployed from a high vantage point on shore overlooking and providing coverage of an entire site, is potentially effective as a trigger for other instruments as part of an integrated package, or as a complement to land-based surveys (Mateos et al 2010;Polagye et al 2014;McCann and Bell 2017;Walker and Taylor 2018; Appendix 1, Figure 3). Surveys conducted from a vessel or aerially are also suitable methods to assess abundance and presence at this scale, although logistics and cost are potentially prohibitive (Appendix 1, Figure 3).…”

Adaptable Monitoring Package Development and Deployment: Lessons Learned for Integrated Instrumentation at Marine Energy Sites

“…The potential benefit from integrating a broad range of instrumentation in relatively compact systems has been recognized by the marine energy research community since at least 2014 [10] and several integrated systems were developed and deployed for marine energy environmental research in recent years. These include the Adaptable Monitoring Package (AMP), which is the focus of this paper, the Fundy Advanced Sensor Technology (FAST) platform developed by the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE) [11], the Flow and Benthic Ecology (FLOWBEC) platform developed by the University of Aberdeen [12], the Integrated Monitoring Package developed by the European Marine Energy Centre [11], and "Plug & Play" under development by the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St. Andrews University [11].…”

Demonstration of Biofouling Mitigation Methods for Long-Term Deployments of Optical Cameras

“…While biofouling is possible on any of the converter surfaces, general-purpose biofouling mitigation methods may be different from the approach taken for more sensitive components, such as sensor transducers. Optical camera observations have been proposed to inform a number of critical environmental questions (Polagye et al, 2014), and the shore cables for the energy converters provide sufficient power and data bandwidth to support high-resolution optical measurements over extended periods. This paper discusses the implementation of biofouling mitigation measures on the optical ports of a camera system developed for long-term monitoring of marine energy converters (Joslin et al, 2014a).…”