About the Project:
The Subsea Soundscape (S3) programme aims to build a pioneering regional framework in the Celtic Sea to provide valuable insights into underwater noise conditions and marine mammal presence.
By combining new and existing acoustic data, S3 will establish a marine mammal & noise evidence base, informing maritime spatial planning and consenting decisions for floating wind development.
At-sea mooring units, equipped with state-of-the-art broadband acoustic recorders, pop-up acoustic retrieval systems and tag detection capabilities will be deployed with eDNA and CTD environmental sampling at service intervals to maximise data capture.
The S3 project forms part of the Offshore Wind Evidence and Change programme, led by The Crown Estate in partnership with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.
The Offshore Wind Evidence and Change programme is an ambitious strategic research and data-led programme. Its aim is to facilitate the sustainable and coordinated expansion of offshore wind to help meet the UK’s commitments to low carbon energy transition whilst supporting clean, healthy, productive and biologically diverse seas.
S3 Project partners include ORE Catapult, Celtic Sea Power and the University of Exeter.
Project Objectives:
1. Deploy a large-scale network of 21 acoustic monitoring stations in the Celtic Sea.
2. Support a new Marine mammal evidence base for the Celtic Sea.
3. Create region wide acoustic soundscape model and open-source baseline acoustic data of the Celtic Sea integrating new S3 data and other secured acoustic data sources.
4. Co-developing road maps with regulators (England and Wales) for the use of acoustic soundscape models for consenting
5. Compare S3 regional approach to data gathering to industry standard data collection for EIA, to determine the difference in cost, time, carbon, safety.
6. eDNA & water column physics sampling at all stations will support new data outputs and help cross validate DAS, visual, satellite and acoustic techniques.
