Abstract
The primary purpose of this report is to document the technical performance of Spoor’s pioneering offshore pre-construction bird monitoring solution. By mounting cameras on a multi-sensor Fugro buoy and deploying Spoor’s AI software to detect and track birds, a range of new possibilities emerge to capture bird activity data far offshore – but this type of platform and environment also create new challenges. Cameras are subjected to challenging environmental conditions far outside the scope of previous installations (on a turbine service platform for example), and are practically inaccessible by humans for long periods of time, requiring extremely robust hardware, and limiting access to data during deployment. The buoy also moves dynamically with the wind and waves, which requires an evolution of methods to interpret the data. This pilot demonstrates how these challenges manifested and have been managed. Although the analysis of the biodiversity data itself is not the primary purpose of this report, these data are also very interesting and have the potential to provide entirely new insights about bird activity in the area and to highlight the potential nature-positive impact of this technology when applied at scale.