Offshore Wind Bird Monitoring: Validating Spoor's Buoy-Mounted Camera Technology

Vision Statement

Spoor is a Norwegian-based software company focused on developing solutions that enable the wind industry to measure and report on impacts to birds, operationalise analyses, and implement mitigation measures.   

They are dedicated in fostering a balance between wind power development and nature conservation; with a mission to develop innovative, technology-driven solutions that allow renewable energy projects to track and minimise their environmental impact. 

Spoor’s camera data reduce risk for projects by equipping them with the knowledge to avoid critical setbacks like permit delays. Developers can optimise budgets required to ensure compliance with permit conditions and meet regulatory requirements to secure construction or operating licences. 

 

Project purpose – validation of bird monitoring technology at offshore wind farms

Spoor combines camera technology and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to inform collision risk mitigation at wind farms. These approaches can be used both onshore and offshore; however, it is particularly important to advance avian monitoring approaches offshore where traditional onshore post-construction fatality monitoring surveys are impossible to undertake.   

Spoor has been trialling various cameras and camera mounting scenarios to determine the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. For example, Spoor have deployed buoy-mounted cameras at Hywind Tampen, the world's first floating wind farm. Their use of AI greatly increases the efficiency of processing large volumes of video data and quality controlled by their in-house ornithologist.   

To ensure that data collected by buoy-mounted cameras can accurately inform the understanding and mitigation of potential impacts to birds, Spoor required an independent verification of the performance of this approach for pre-construction monitoring of birds at offshore wind farms.

 

Challenge – Novel technology and application

Buoy-mounted camera technologies are a novel monitoring approach for offshore wind farms and as such, The Biodiversity Consultancy had never worked on a project like this before. Nevertheless, applying our knowledge of seabird behaviours, ecology, Collision Risk Modelling, and analytical approaches put us in a good position to collaborate with Spoor on this project. TBC’s recommendations needed to be pragmatic and implementable given the limitations of working with offshore buoys related to space and power efficiency.

 

Our approach – Testing assumptions and camera capabilities for camera-based bird monitoring at offshore wind farms

The Biodiversity Consultancy reviewed the output data and analytical approaches used during a buoy-mounted camera trial in the context of other commonly used methods for collecting ornithological data for offshore wind farms, including turbine-mounted cameras, radar, digital aerial surveys, vessel-based surveys and telemetry. Key parameters included the artificial intelligence performance, identification of avian species, detection range capabilities, flight height insights, track duration and bird activity insights.

 

Outcome – confirming proof of concept and identifying areas for development

The strengths and weaknesses of buoy-mounted cameras were assessed in the context of other commonly used survey methods. Considerations included the relative costs, sampling approaches, accuracy of detection, species identification, flight height estimation and spatial and temporal coverage.   

The review concluded that whilst the spatial coverage of camera-based systems, including the buoy-based cameras, is limited, they otherwise provide a good balance of temporal coverage, accuracy and flight height estimation (to inform collision risk), whilst maintaining cost efficiency. As such, buoy-mounted cameras are likely to be a worthwhile complementary survey method to traditional approaches, such as vessel, or digital aerial surveys, which offer better spatial coverage, but are more limited in the temporal coverage that they can achieve.  

The Biodiversity Consultancy considered the wider application of buoy-mounted camera technology and developed a set of conclusions and recommendations for future development of the approach. From this work, both Spoor and collaborators were able to gain insights to better understand and interpret the current data collected and identify the most valuable areas for future development of their technological approaches. 

We continue to work with Spoor in collaboration with a range of wind energy developers to analyse data from turbine-mounted cameras on bird activity at operational offshore wind farms. This work currently includes assessing the performance of camera systems, such as CCTV cameras and current methods for generating estimates of collision rates. The rich data recorded by cameras at sea enable new insights to be made, as well as enhanced monitoring and mitigation possibilities. The near-continuous temporal coverage from video cameras can reveal new behavioural insights and rare events previously unknown, such as the presence of unexpected birds like woodpeckers and raptors far out to sea. We hope to further the understanding of avoidance behaviour of seabirds and the potential for confirmed collision data to be used to refine, inform and validate existing collision risk models.