Abstract
Equinor and Spoor have partnered to deploy and evaluate Spoor AI bird-monitoring technology on Hywind Tampen, filling the data gap for accurate, verifiable, high-volume and long-term data on bird activity offshore. These data are potentially hugely valuable in reducing project risk and ensuring that offshore wind is planned and operated in environmentally responsible ways. Uniquely, this project uses AI to process videos from CCTV cameras which are pre-installed on the floating wind turbine service platforms (originally to monitor operational activities). This innovative configuration means that greater value can be captured from the same hardware performing two different functions. Although the CCTV cameras are lower resolution (and therefore range) than the cameras which Spoor typically uses, this project has the potential to enable the collection of bird-activity and ID data from any and all offshore assets which have CCTV cameras installed. This would enable a rapid scaling of bird activity data-gathering offshore which has the potential to make a huge contribution to the state of the science and of the offshore wind industry worldwide. This pilot is intended to explore the viability hypothesis. The primary purpose of this report is to document the technical performance of Spoor’s solution, and describe its potential nature-positive impact when applied at scale. Analysis of the biodiversity data itself is not the primary purpose.