Coordinating and Disseminating Research on Environmental Effects of Marine Renewable Energy

OES-Environmental hosted a public webinar, “Coordinating and Disseminating Research on Environmental Effects of Marine Renewable Energy” from 8:00-9:30am PDT (3:00-4:30pm UTC) on September 28th, 2023.

During this webinar OES-E Environmental provided updates on progress to date and what's to come in the 2024 State of the Science report. OES-Environmental talked about the important role of coordinating and disseminating research on environmental effects of MRE and practical applications of OES-Environmental resources. Joe Haxel from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's (PNNL) Triton initiative and Doug Gillespie from the University of St. Andrew's Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) joined OES-Environmental to discuss their efforts to expand our understanding by highlighting examples from their research around two key stressor-receptor interactions - underwater noise and collision risk.

• Joe's presentation focused on recent application of the IEC 62600-40 Acoustic Characterization of Marine Energy Converters technical specification and aligning the results with US National Marine Fisheries Service threshold criteria for underwater noise. 
• Doug's presentation described the passive and active acoustic tracking system recently deployed at the MeyGen site for data collection over a one-year period between May 2022 and May 2023 including the hardware, processing chain, and some example results. 

Presentation slides

Presenters: 

• Dr. Andrea Copping is a senior research scientist at PNNL in Seattle, WA and holds the position of Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the University of Washington. She leads OES-Environmental and international project on environmental effects of MRE development around the world under the IEA Ocean Energy Systems. Her research focuses on environmental effects from the development of wave and tidal energy and offshore wind installations. Using risk-based approaches, Dr. Copping leads a team that integrates laboratory, field, and modeling studies into a coherent body of evidence to support siting and consenting decisions. 
• Dr. Joe Haxel is a research scientist at the PNNL in Sequim, WA where his current focus is on passive acoustic technologies and methods for measuring and characterizing sounds from marine energy systems. He has a 20-year background in ocean acoustics that includes development of hydrophone systems for fixed and mobile platforms to study marine geophysical processes, bioacoustics, and anthropogenic sounds from the depths of Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench into the shallow surf zone. 
• Dr. Douglas Gillespie is a physicist working at the SMRU at the University of St. Andrews. He has been developing software for automatic passive acoustic detection of marine mammal sounds since the mid-1990s and is the lead developer of the open source PAMGuard 'Detection, Classification, and Localisation' software. More recently, he has been branching out into developing detectors and visualization tools for multibeam active sonar data. Current research interests mostly involve using passive and active acoustic systems to investigate fine scale movement behavior of marine mammals in the vicinity of tidal turbines.

Webinar Recording