Expert Forum: Risk of Collision between Marine Mammals and Tidal Turbines - Assessing at the Population Level

Expert Forum #4

Lead by Carol Sparling, SMRU Consulting
August 16, 2016

Summary:
The risk to marine mammals, fish, and other animals from tidal turbines continues to be of concern to regulators and stakeholders, even though the scientific community considers that close interactions are likely to extremely rare. Observing collisions and near-turbine interactions in high-energy tidal areas is challenging; the development of predictive models and conceptual frameworks for defining interactions can be useful in furthering our understanding.

This expert forum will focus on the population level assessment of collision risk. Discussion will focus on the frameworks available for understanding and evaluating the population consequences of collision related mortality e.g. PBR based thresholds, PVA, stochastic population modelling and how regulators in different countries make decisions. We will also hopefully explore the idea of setting threshold levels of impact and ‘apportioning’ impact between different potential sources.

The introductory slides presented by Carol Sparling are available here.

Experts who Participated in this Discussion Included (in order of appearance):

A video recording of the discussion has been posted below:

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