Edinburgh, Scotland’s Heriot Watt University will lead an ambitious study to understand how floating offshore wind farms (FLOW) impact life throughout the marine food chain. The study will gather data from the Celtic Sea, identified by the UK Government as a prime location for accelerating offshore wind infrastructure.
Called FRONTLINE, the 4-year project is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) via the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and The Crown Estate. It will employ technologies such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), satellite remote sensing, digital video aerial surveys and seabird and fisheries tracking as well as using seabirds as ‘animal oceanographers’ and ‘sentinels of the sea’, to get a birds’-eye view on changing seas and turbine perception both above and under water. This novel approach will provide new insights into whether wind farm structures are creating collision hazards for seabirds and how ocean predator foraging habits are being affected.
Professor Stephen Votier, expert in Seabird Ecology at the Lyell Centre, Heriot-Watt’s Global Research Institute for Earth and Marine Sciences, is leading the £3.5 million (USD$4.4 million) project.
“Floating offshore wind farms have the potential to accelerate global net zero targets however less is known about the ecological consequences, from ocean physics to biodiversity,” he said. “By focusing our team’s expertise on ocean fronts, which play a vital role in driving marine productivity and climate cycling, the FRONTLINE project will improve understanding of how physical structures could affect plankton and forage fish dynamics, with knock-on effects on marine predators and commercial fisheries.”
The study is being co-led by project partners across the UK, including the Marine Biological Association (MBA), the University of Plymouth, Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), the Universities of Oxford and Liverpool, and HiDef Aerial Surveying Ltd.
PML will apply its expertise on satellite remote sensing to locate and characterize all shelf-sea fronts near the FLOW sites, both in near-real time to guide the AUV sampling plans and historically for seabird foraging studies.The MBA and the University of Plymouth are jointly leading AUV deployments in the Celtic Sea to investigate key ecosystem drivers, from physical ocean features to biological hotspots like plankton blooms and forage fish at the bottom of the ocean food web.
Leveraging NERC’s Autosub Long Range 1500—famously known as Boaty McBoatface— which is unique in its ability to operate in strong tidal flows for weeks at a time, they will enhance its capabilities with digital plankton imaging technology developed at the University of Plymouth. This innovation will complement a comprehensive suite of environmental sensors, providing a more mechanistic understanding of ocean ecosystem change.
In another scientific first, HiDef will also use the study to trial the deployment of acoustic recorders for detecting marine mammals around ocean fronts, which will provide insight into how they’re used by apex marine predators.
