OWFSOMM

OWFSOMM has highlighted the difficulty of comparing abundance estimates obtained by visual and digital methods from aerial surveys, showing that it is preferable to opt for the same monitoring method throughout the life cycle of an offshore wind farm. As offshore wind farms have to be flown over at higher altitudes for security reasons, digital aerial surveys should be favoured from the environmental baseline onwards. By developing promising automated algorithms and implementing a multimodal data acquisition approach, OWFSOMM have laid the first operational building blocks for integrated, continuous and long-term monitoring of the various compartments of the marine megafauna, an objective currently being pursued in the DRACCAR-MMERMAID project.