Conference on Wind energy & Wildlife impacts (CWW) 2025
The PrePARED team attended CWW2025 and presented recent PrePARED findings including:
- ‘Measurements of noise levels and porpoise disturbance during pile-driving at Moray West Offshore Windfarm; comparison with model predictions used in regulatory assessments’ – Paul Thompson (University of Aberdeen)
- ‘Marine mammal foraging activity at an offshore windfarm site: Do changes in prey fields influence marine mammal response to disturbance?’ – Aude Benhemma-Le Gall (University of Aberdeen)
- ‘Effects of acoustic logger array design on studies of cetacean responses to offshore wind farms’ – Gordon Hastie (University of St Andrews)
- ‘Fish for thought: The nutritional quality of prey species within a developing offshore wind landscape’ – Philippa Wright (University of St Andrews)
- ‘Seabirds and fish distributions and behaviour: understanding predator-prey interactions to build evidence for cumulative impact assessment’ – Esther Jones (BioSS)
- ‘Offshore wind turbine foundations influence the distribution & behaviour of haddock Melanogrammus aeglefinus. – A case study using complementary methods in two operational wind farms in Scotland’ – Anthony Bicknell (University of Exeter)
- POSTER ‘Cumulative effects using SeabORD’ – Christopher Pollock (UKCEH)
Summary of summer fieldwork
The team are starting to analyse the final PrePARED survey data which includes 41 demersal tows, 30 CTD casts, 15 acoustic and seabird at sea transects counting 23,641 seabirds across 17 species and 5 pelagic tows.
This data will be analysed and used to improve pelagic fish/seabird distribution models, improve environmental co-variate resolution and allow the team to look at the drivers of pelagic fish distributions.
A manuscript using findings from this is being drafted and the team plan to present initial results at MASTS Annual Science Meeting in Glasgow, 18-20 November.
Upcoming…
- The team will be presenting at MASTS Annual Science Meeting, Glasgow, 18-20th November
- 4 papers will be submitted for peer review including;
- Paper using 2024 BRUV data to consider finescale effect of distance to offshore wind turbines for prey
- Paper on predation of tagged Cod using acoustic telemetry data
- Paper on the effects of acoustic array designs on dose-response relationships for porpoises to pile driving
- Paper on the SeabORD tool for predicting impacts of offshore windfarms on seabirds.
- Release of SeabORD 2.0
- Report on Offshore Wind Farm Cumulative Effects Assessments
If you have an interest in any of the above, or wish to find out more information, please let us know at PrePARED@gov.scot