 record on this computer. There you go. So today we are honored to be joined by two scientists working to understand and prevent turbine impacts to different parts of the marine environment, including marine mammals and bats. Dr. Sophie van Perre is the passive acoustic program lead at NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Service Center, Science Center, excuse me, and NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She leads a team which uses innovative passive acoustic technologies to evaluate the impacts of various human produced sounds on acoustically sensitive marine mammals and to aid in the management, monitoring, and conservation efforts for those species. Welcome Dr. van Perre. And Dr. Trevor Peterson is a senior biologist and project manager at Stantec, an engineering services company. Dr. Peterson is a Bowdoin grad and he received his PhD from UMain and he specializes in work related to renewable energy projects, bat migration, and rare species assessments. Welcome Dr. Peterson. And you're on mute, that's okay. Welcome. No, just thanks for the introduction and the opportunity to speak today. All right. Well, let's dive in. Welcome everyone. Dr. van Perre, I'm going to turn it over to you. Sounds great. The first time that anybody's actually pronounced my surname properly, so I'm kind of blown away there. I'm so I'm going to share my screen and pull up a presentation and we can get going. That's present. Can you see that? Yes. Perfect. Great. Thanks. So I'm going to talk to you today about using passive acoustic technologies for understanding room mammals in relation to wind energy development. I'll touch a little bit on visual sightings, but this is passive acoustic. So underwater sounds is really my expertise and that's where I'm going to take you. So prior to passive acoustic technology, really taking off the conventional techniques for studying room mammals were either taking photographs from an airplane or from a boat. The benefits of doing this is, you know, you can identify the species that you're seeing. You can see that they're present. You can also count the number of animals and get some indication of both their health as well as for some species, you can identify individuals from the markings on their bodies. The limitations of these techniques is that, you know, you're really limited by the weather, which as you all know in the Northeast can be pretty horrible at times. And so any wind, any just, you know, rough days really limits your ability to see animals. You need quite a few observers to go out when you're on these type of efforts. So it's quite human like intensive. Obviously, you can't see anything when it's dark out. And these efforts can be quite costly. So this is why we've really developed passive acoustic monitoring as both a valuable alternative as well as an addition to this traditional monitoring style. And it can be used both for marine mammals as well as fisheries. And that's obviously a slide I had from a fisheries talk that's why it says it. The benefits of passive acoustics are that you can see animals, whether it's day or night and through bad weather. So you're really listening under water 24-7 to anything that's going on there. And passive acoustics is great at providing this long-term kind of time record of sounds in the ocean of anything that's happening. It therefore also requires less kind of intensive human resources and can be less costly just because of that in particular. It is limited, though, because you only hear animals when they're making a sound. You can't tell when they're not around if they're not vocalizing. And for most species, it's hard for us still to get from sounds to number of animals. We can do it in some contexts, but not at all. And lastly, there are so many sounds out in the ocean that we have absolutely no clue about who they actually belong to, even what species is making them. So we're still discovering things as we go through and we kind of continue working in this field. So why is passive acoustics so valuable when you're studying under water? Well, so light is absorbed within the first 200 meters of the ocean's surface. So you can see that a lot of the ocean is pretty dark. And what happens is that sound travels five times faster in water than it does in air. So for most marine animals, they use sound as their primary modality for both communication, feeding, navigation, and really a lot of their life functions. What can PAM provide us with? And PAM means passive acoustic monitoring. I'll use that acronym quite a lot. It really provides you with some really important capacity to look spatially at large areas here on the left. And this is data that'll come up again as I talk. This is the Western Atlantic. And these are the dots are recorders, passive acoustic recorders throughout that whole area listening to underwater sounds. And number four is the Gulf of Maine. So you can see it's pretty densely populated there. Long time periods, I told you already that you can record for months to years with passive acoustic monitoring. So it provides you this long time record and allows you to look for changes in the presence of these animals. And then lastly, one of the newer and exciting kind of fields in passive acoustic monitoring is that you can look at species ecology composition. What species do you have in a given place? What kind of species richness is there? And does that persist over time? So when it comes to wind monitoring, I've been really pulled into this kind of area of how do we use PAM for assessing impacts and also monitoring what was happening prior to wind energy, you know, construction and afterwards. So these are the kind of six questions I put together that you really need to ask when you are going about PAM. What is your species of interest? Is your first one quite obvious? But with passive acoustic monitoring, you can hear everything that's going under the ocean. So who are you interested in? Primarily, we tend to be interested in the ESA listed large whales, like the se and fin blue sperm and right whales. But you can also hear other cetaceans like dolphins, as well as seals, pinnipads. You can hear fish and invertebrates. They all make sounds underwater, as well as that you're going to be capturing all the anthropogenics of the man-made sounds that are out there, including, you know, any pile driving for wind farm development, seismic surveys, ship noise and such like. And then as well, you're also going to hear environmental events like earthquakes or weather. So you can really kind of choose a multitude of different species and kind of questions that you want to answer with passive acoustics. So once you've chosen your species, which in this case we'll probably say, you know, North Atlantic right whales, those baleen whales are really our target for the Gulf of Maine and the Northeast. And what are your Pam recording technologies that you've got on offer? So there's two different types of technology that we primarily use. We call them archival and real time. Archival is data that's collected and then you retrieve it after a long period of time and look at it as opposed to real time that provides you with more instantaneous information. The archival is things like recorders that you put at the bottom of the ocean and anchor there. And those you can see them, the red, the, sorry, the yellow circles are what shows those or acoustic tags that you might put on a whale and retrieve afterwards. The green circle show you the real time capabilities that provide you with information as to what animals are calling in near real time. And those are either surface buoys like you've got on the left, where there is an original satellite link that provides you that information, or these autonomous underwater vehicles like the yellow torpedo you can see in the middle of the picture, which is a glider that dives up and down the ocean and relays back its information when it comes to the surface. You've also got, you know, hydrophones that you can tow behind vessels or drop off boats or drifting buoys. Part of acoustic technologies tend to also incorporate telemetry tags, but these tend to produce sound rather than when we talk about passive acoustic monitoring, we're talking about receiving sound rather than producing sounds. So those are all the technologies available. What are your requirements when you're going to go about this? So all these different marine animals vocalize and produce these sounds at very different frequency levels. Your large whales tend to be low in frequency, sperm whales are kind of mid-frequency, dolphins slightly higher, and harbor porpoises are really high. They produce these ultrasonic clicks. So you need to make sure that your equipment is actually targeting the species that you're most interested in. And you can see the range of human hearing there, where the finwell is just under our hearing range, and dolphins and harbor porpoises tend to be slightly above. So this is just a different picture of a similar type of kind of intent really with hardware and software being kind of the, that you need to make sure your hardware and software covers these frequency ranges for the biological, but underneath you've got the anthropogenic. Obviously it depends on what we're focusing on. Is it air guns that are going to be used? Is it pile driving primarily like for these wind energy development? What type of noise are you also trying to capture if that is your concern? Now what is your PAM design? One big thing you need to think about when you go out there is how do you want to put these recorders out? How do you want to be listening? And these are a few of the least sites, these wind energy proposed least sites that you can see out there. Obviously these are not the Gulf of Maine ones because those are still kind of being developed, but these are the ones that are going to be happening from kind of Cape Cod down to the mid-Atlantic regions to Cape Hatteras. All the way on your right you can kind of see the different colors, those are just one set of lease blocks that's off the Massachusetts Rhode Island area. So really when it goes about how do I start to collect my information for whales is how far away can I hear them? So you need to look at the detection range of these whales. In this case we've got right whales which focalize over by like 10 kilometer radius and so we put this 20 by 20 kind of grid cell together and saying okay if I have a recorder out there this is the distance over which I can actually hear a right whale. And there you can see both you've got a regional perspective in terms of how you can put your recorders out if you want to just understand what's going on regionally at one of the least sites or at multiple least sites within a given area or you've got the broad perspective where you can actually be monitoring and listening acoustically across all of those least sites up from Cape Cod all the way down to the mid-Atlantic region. So what type of data does PAM actually give us? This is where it kind of becomes really interesting. So what I want to talk to you and show you some examples of results that we get first is from archival passive acoustics. So those are the recorders that you put at the bottom of the ocean and you need to go back and retrieve to get your information. Now here this is a these are results from a study and again you know the Gulf of Maine there is number four but this was a western Atlantic wide study that we conducted starting all the way up in Greenland and actually went down to the Caribbean. We used all the recorders that anybody over those 2004 to 2014 so that decade had put out across this region. All the scientists collaborated with us to provide their information and we were interested in looking at when did we hear right whales, when did we hear fin whales, blue whales, humpback whales, and seawales across these areas. Could we show seasonal changes? Could we show how they use these areas using solely just the vocalizations that they make? Now this is the results from the right whale acoustics that we saw. You can see this kind of heat map that's changing as the sounds that we recorded changes. The red shows where you have a lot of calls from right whales and obviously the lighter color is less and so you can see their seasonal movements now in July there you can see them moving up into Canadian waters and into the Gulf of Maine when they tend to go there to feed and then they kind of move further up and then slowly as you know fall comes down you'll see them migrating down the coastline and ending up with December where you've got them actually all the way up and down the coastline down off Florida where they're calving but you can see that they're also present up around Cape Hatteras there as well as up in the northeast in areas as well so it shows that basically these right whales are moving a lot more than we had previously thought. This is another way that we look at our information from the calls that we've recorded this again is this decade-long data set and on the left hand side you can see the different areas again for you guys you know four is the Gulf of Maine, 11 is the Caribbean, number one is David Strait which is up there by Greenland and the different colors denote the different calls that we heard from the different baleen whale species and down the bottom you've got the months January through December so you can really track in each of these areas when whales were around and when they're not and this is really important in terms of timing of wind energy construction if you're going to create noise you want to try and do it during the time period when there are really likely to be less animals around so you can try and target that by looking at this type of information so as to minimize risks. Now to give you some just a flavor of what you can get from real-time passive acoustics this is the type of acoustics where you get information and more instantaneously you can get it whenever for example in this case the glider might come to the surface or you can get it from a surface buoy as it records and reports information so this is just a quick look at really over the last 15 years where we have had this type of real-time acoustic effort these are both those autonomous gliders that we talked about that go up and down in the water column as well as more buoys that are just fixed in one spot and the map those are denoted by the stars as well as the circles and then you've also got wave gliders and these are kind of self-propelled they use wave energy to keep going now these are much more kind of still in development they produce a lot more noise because they have this concertina effect and therefore it's harder to use them to listen to underwater sounds but it's something that together with our collaborators at the Woods Hole National Graphic Institute we're working on developing further but so you can see we've covered a lot of area and monitored in a lot of places using this real-time technology now why is this real-time technology actually useful here actually this is a track of one of the gliders that ran throughout the Gulf of Maine in the winter time I think it's from last year last winter so what this helps us do is it helps us tell where and when are we hearing different whale species the bottom right one is the where the right whales are and it helps reduce aerial or vessel survey time if we really want to get images particularly of right whales or their health status this glider can tell us whenever it hears a whale so you can direct the vessel or the airplane to go there and really save on time searching for them it also helps obviously with mitigation we have used this technology for reducing ship strike in the boston shipping channel at the moment in a variety of places and we've started creating this new format in which we use these detections to put in place slow zones it's already done but with visual sightings there are these our managers put in place these boxes to say hey there's right whales here please be aware of that and slow down in this case now what we're starting to do is we're adding acoustics to that as well just as an kind of additional ability sightings technique and obviously it can inform operations and for example with wind energy it can tell us whether the animals are in this in that area if and when construction is happening so this real-time technology it's quite recent and it really is valuable and and has a lot of applications you can look at if you look at that website up the top there robotforwhales.hoey.edu my colleague who operates most of these instruments has got them out and you can see which ones are out now and what they're detecting this is just an example of the slow zones that I mentioned before that get put in place from when we hear a detection of a right whale you can see those sounds there to actually what it looks like and the information gets provided out to mariners in terms of hey there's right whales here this please slow down during this time period there's lots of ways of getting this information which is really cool you can actually download whale alert on your phone that's an app that anybody can get we particularly those who need it more often we get these notifications either by email or by text just saying hey in the last hour you know off this recorder we heard fin whales or like I said there's a couple of web platforms the robots for whales that I mentioned and then also a whale map which is a Canadian based map but it also shows sightings in the Gulf of Maine or in US waters too so you can look up any of those and get that information so lastly passive acoustics really collects a huge amount of acoustic recordings and so we have a lot of kind of we're developing a lot of new methods in which to report and archive this data so that we can serve it up and it can be used usefully these are a number of different ways I've showed you a couple of these already there are no as NCI the National Center for Environmental Information actually is trying to provide a place to store acoustic recordings they do this in perpetuity they also use store like satellite information as well any of the weather data goes there so they're starting to ramp this up to provide the same service for acoustic recordings I'll show you this databaseing detection site that we've actually developed that's almost live and how we use that in just a moment and then you've got obviously the whale alert map and the other types of visualization that I mentioned to you before so this is the map that it's not live yet we're just really kind of doing the final touches on this but this presents all of the acoustic detections that have ever been made since 2004 to now of different species in this case I've just got a screenshot of right whales it's you see the different on the left hand side you can see the different type of platforms whether it's a recorded that's at the bottom a glider a surface buoy or such like you can search for time different time periods different years so you can really hone in on your area and this time around I've I've kind of it's you can see the whole world but obviously in this map I've just kind of honed in on the Gulf of Maine and put a little square around it so you can see all the different detections that have happened there and the red circles are where you heard right whales the blue circles are where nothing was heard and green is where it's likely that they were heard so just kind of to recap you know there's been a real explosion of need for this passive acoustic technology and particularly now with wind energy coming online it's just that need is just kind of spiraling they both need that information for marine mammals but also a fish I actually have a study right now of Cox's ledge on Atlantic cod trying to delineate spawning grounds in that area where there's going to be wind energy construction in order to know when they're there when they're spawning and what kind of protections we need to put in place there's real-time capabilities for both of those either detecting Atlantic cod like the track line with those little pink and green and yellow circles on the right or the ones on the left where you're detecting right whales so there's really a huge kind of need for this technology when it comes to wind energy development and I think that might be my last slide it is thank you very much for listening fantastic that is some incredible research thank you for sharing let's see folks we're going to pause for just a few minutes here and see if Dr. Vampires has any questions I so if you do have questions please again put them in the Q&A box down below we do have one here from Gina Dr. do you think you'll be ever do you think you'll ever be able to ID misbehaving boats that get too close or harass it like can you hear the engine somehow and understand like a fingerprint we actually have a study both on going in Australia to identify illegal fishing activity in marine parks as well as just we're going to about to start here with the NOAA's office of law enforcement to try and identify when there's boats misbehaving in closure areas so yes absolutely that's another aspect that you can look at that's really interesting a question from Barbara her understanding about floating turbines is that they won't involve any pile driving do we know what other noises might impact whales or marine mammals that are associated with floating turbines I'm not really sure actually I don't know that much about floating turbines I do know that you know they have to somehow anchor them they dare anchorages I know there's cables I've seen that so there's going to be some level of construction that will be needed but I think they're advantageous in terms of having no pile driving which is really the primary source is is is great obviously having this kind of big you know thing put up in an area where you're used to navigating and feeding and so you know I don't know whether there's likely any problems with entanglements with any of the cables or the ropes that might maybe out there but it's definitely in in my opinion in as much as I know about the floating turbines and a preferable approach for sure right and just to recap some of the some of what Dr. Habib Dogger shared with us in our first presentation right they're unlike you know sea bottom based anchored wind floating offshore when Lisa design now of course does not involve pile driving it's held down with sort of giant anchors and so the turbine and everything can be constructed on shore safely and quietly for in terms of marine mammals and then towed out and sort of anchored held in place by three chains is there or three cables is there is the plan now his claim during that his first presentation was that he didn't think entanglement of at least of those big anchor cables would be an issue they're simply too taught to you know to to tangle up in any way whether there are issues related to other cables associated with a floating offshore wind that sort of remains to be seen as it's still a new technology but that's yeah that's what we we thought Dr. from a question from Juanita is there a way to measure how sound and vibrations from offshore wind turbines affects marine mammals there definitely is I know there's a few studies looking at at vibrations I think you know there's there's different aspects right there's the humming that the cable as it produces electricity will produce as you know because the cable runs kind of gets buried in the sand so that is thought to maybe potentially have some effect on bent the communities as well as fish I don't know that it'll have an awful lot of effect on marine mammals but it's not something that's ever been looked at but then obviously also the turbines as they spin will provide there is reverberation that will go down the column and into the water though you know these animals are subject to an awful lot of other anthropogenic impacts boats you know other activities so there is a lot of noise out there and there's also just weather so I don't know how much this will actually bother them it's just like one of the issues is always just adding more noise to the ocean right so that cumulative effect sure and so just to sort of follow up on that I mean boats but these animals rely on they hear each other and they hear the sounds which are I don't I'm not a biologist I don't know if it's sort of vibrations that they're hearing or the actual how how it works sorry but so at what level are you concerned about maybe the interruptions happening in terms of them being able to hear each other because they're communicating over very large distances right they are and it is this thing called communication masking right or loss of communication space that we've actually studied around Stellwagen Bank and and it can be significant but I think it's it's kind of that additional like you know if you add the harm on top of the vessels because one of the things is a lot of these turbines do need to be serviced regularly right there'll be a lot more boat traffic in terms of Wales dragons but so there will be these these additions of sounds that we're not yet we're thinking of that comes into that so absolutely I mean that is a concern and it's something you can definitely look at and and monitor to see how much extra noise something like you know a conventional wind turbine versus kind of I guess area will provide versus this floating turbine great I just want to ask two more questions then we'll go to Dr. Peterson and if there is time before 1 30 when we're finished we can Dr. ask Dr. Van Praes some of the final questions William asks he says that the navy has been listening to submarines for decades have or will they share any of their technology with you no no it's classified so to try and get that out of there is it's it's impossible unfortunately intriguing answer and finally for now a question from Barbara again sort of a flip side of this is there have people done research or is there a way to maybe use underwater acoustic signaling to prevent marine males from from approaching turbines or to keep them out of areas where they could get in trouble so they've tried these things like with seal scanners around nets or or similarly harbor porpoise pingers and there's there's some evidence that it that it works for a certain amount of time but but there's a lot of animals habituate you know if your dinner is right in that spot you're going to come back to it even if there's this annoying sound around so it doesn't tend to be effective and actually for right whales we actually it was tried there's a study that tried this and the problem that we found is that they shot straight to the surface when they heard the sound which made them more at risk of being hit by a boat so animals can really produce these unexpected reactions to these startle noises that might not be what we want and it's just not there's nothing easy or there's no easy solution to that very interesting well thank you so very much for your presentation and without further ado i'd love to have trevor uh dr peterson please turn on your video if you can and take it away okay thank you much i will i cannot start oh yeah okay there we go there you go very good and here are my slides um okay does that look good i don't see it yet oh oh sorry you got out of sequence okay share screen here it comes good okay thank you very much um well we'll take things out from under the surface and go up into the air now and talk about bats and what we know about bats and and i was struck listening to um dr van perry's presentation by how much you know parallels in terms of methods and and you know actually some of the results there are between acoustically monitoring whales and acoustically monitoring bats so much of what i'll be talking about is is also acoustic monitoring and what what we can learn from that information how we can use that to to think about potential impacts from offshore wind so in preparing these slides uh you know in the last couple of weeks i've been sitting in on several uh working groups talking about the state of current knowledge on bats and offshore wind and what you know when you get a lot of bat biologists or people in a room starting to brainstorm what you end up thinking of more than what we know is what the amount that we don't know and i i tried to keep to keep that in perspective but but have this at least touch on some of the things we know but also the everything we learn um often raises several questions and additional things that we would like to know um and really you know what is this information that we have on bats offshore what implications might there be from offshore wind energy development and operation and then what are some of the more most important things we need to learn as the industry expands so just a quick background on the bats that occur in Maine this is um we have eight species of bats bats tend to be quite diverse as far as mammals go but all of the bats that appear that occur in Maine share a few fundamental behavioral characteristics they're nocturnal for one they're uh insectivorous and they use echolocation to capture prey and to avoid obstacles and for short-range navigation um bats are not blind they can see reasonably well and they so they do use eyesight as as navigation as well but they echolocate extensively and they rely on this sense to to get around and that's really one of the one of the it allows us to monitor them in with one of the most useful ways otherwise bats because they're nocturnal and very small and fly they're quite difficult to study um unlike most small mammals bats live a relatively long time on the order of up to 20 even 30 years um but they are very small and the species in Maine range from a minimum of about three grams up to about 38 grams so obviously they're a lot smaller than the whale roughly in the same body size range as small migratory songbirds um despite the similarities the bats in Maine do exhibit quite a range of life histories and the most relevant to what we'll be talking about today are the certain species that are long-distance migrants and those are circled in blue here the hoary bat eastern red bat and silver-haired bat do not hibernate they don't go in caves in the winter but instead they fly relatively long distances to avoid winter and the remaining species do hibernate often colonially often in caves so the little brown bat northern long-eared bat are the ones that you may have heard most about recently because the they've been susceptible to devastating white nose fungus that has infected some of these hibernacula and and killed large numbers of bats in these colonial roosting areas um by contrast we don't know nearly as much about hoary bats silver-haired bats and eastern red bats because they don't congregate they're not they don't lend themselves well to be encountered or to having population estimates but these three species the migratory ones are found quite often in post construction carcass searches at terrestrial wind farms so these these are the species that are primarily involved and primarily susceptible to collision and turbine related fatality so we we know quite a bit now about when and where and possibly why bats are interacting with terrestrial wind farms and the challenge now becomes how much of that information might translate to the offshore environment so i'll skip that one for now offshore you know by definition according to the bureau of ocean energy management is water that's beyond three nautical miles from shore so in and for the regulatory perspective these are managed federally whereas waters within three miles of shore are are managed by the state and so in main when we're talking about wind energy it's generally would be occurring in these offshore federally managed waters and really this does not present what you typically think of as that habitat bats like nocturnal songbirds you know they cannot roost on the water they're really there's no fixed habitat there for them however they're they're i mean they're obviously highly mobile and able to cover very large distances flying and so there's no surprise perhaps that they do occur offshore particularly during migration we think and before we started doing this about 10 years ago um really the the only information that we had on bats was anecdotal observations you know going back to the 1800s lighthouse keepers ship captains fishermen would be reporting anecdotal observations of bats as far as you know hundreds of miles from shore in some cases um the more reliable records came from lighthouses if you can see at the top dot up there is actually the the um i believe is a matinicus rock um and where a lighthouse keeper kept quite good notes about the various uh birds and bats that he would see um and what they noticed a lot of the observations had in common was that bats would be occurring primarily in the fall and primarily during reasonably good weather so not as if they're not blown to sea but um occurring there of their own accord so this was sort of the state of knowledge 10 or 15 years ago at what point um Stantec began a an offshore acoustic monitoring program and so much of what we know now and much of what we'll be speaking about is based on the results of that acoustic monitoring effort so unlike whales and um except dolphins are you know share this with bats they echolocate in the ultrasonic spectrum so we can is they're essentially undetectable to human ears however acoustic detectors are able to monitor those high frequencies also unlike whales the sounds that bats produce travel very short distances they provide a lot of information over a small area so we can only detect a bat when it's flying within um in some cases typically less than 30 meters of a bat detector so when you put a detector on a lighthouse on an island for example you're not actually measuring a bat offshore but to have gotten to that island the bat would have had to cross offshore waters and so what we did was try to accumulate information from a variety of offshore sites remote islands structures and research vessels and put that all together just to see if we could tell a story of when and why bats were occurring offshore so among the sites we monitored here is pictured is Monhegan Island and this is just a picture of what one of these um style of acoustic detectors looks like so similar to so the case whales really what you get from acoustics is a representation of bat activity it's not a census of bats and it's not the complete picture of what bats are doing but you can use this information to to figure out especially temporal patterns and seasonal patterns in bat activity so the quick the cliff's note version of our results was bats were detected everywhere but not often so this is a series of photos of some of the places that we monitored and at every site I believe there were 40 some locations we monitored we did detect bats at some point in um there were there were certain times of year where we detected bats quite regularly and other times when they were centrally absent but they were present at least on a some number of nights at every location so these graphs are showing again the three migratory species I'll be focusing on eastern red bats, hoary bats, and silverhead bats and they show kind of the same trend of being most frequently detected during August and September and this coincides with their fall migration period and also the fall breeding period so unlike songbirds um bats breed in the fall and then you know they they have pups the following spring but there's a lot of behavior a lot of movement going on in the fall not only displacement from one for summer range to winter range but a lot of movement associated with breeding so this pattern in timing of bats detected offshore coincides quite closely with the timing of fatalities at wind energy projects and these same three species comprise well over 75 percent of carcasses found at terrestrial wind projects and here's a photo of a eastern red bat along with a screenshot of you know what one of these echolocation calls look like so you can tell species relatively well based on the frequency and the profile of of the echolocation pulses that you record so the the little bit longer apologies for the amount of text on here but the some of the key findings again we detected bats at all locations there was a highly seasonal pattern um activity the amount of activity and the frequency of activity both decreased with distance from the mainland most of our bat calls we recorded were during calm warm conditions and we did detect bats up to 81 miles from shore eastern red bats occurred at almost all of the sites and and recounted for the lion's share of identified passes and again the other two migratory species silver haired and hoary bats were also detected in most sites but in lesser in lower numbers but even some of the smallest species these three to six gram myotis were detected at some of the most remote sites um i've included later on i'll include a link to the more the more complete report of these findings the data interfaces and as flashy as what what you saw just now for whales but you can actually go and see the nightly data from all of these offshore sites on a website called bat amp and have included the link here so you can explore by year and actually drill down and see nightly breakdowns of of which species were detected where another way that we can figure out what bats are doing offshore is part of what's known as the modus network this is a network of passive telemetry receiving stations the the map here is several years old this was begun in canada and has now extended throughout much of the east coast and these all monitor a common frequency and what that enables is a coordinated telemetry network that's capable of of monitoring very small animals so back in 2014 we tagged um several bats we we did a tagging effort at several locations along the main coast and were able to track along with some other researchers about 40 to 45 migratory bats some of which provided us with quite a lot of information about what individual bats are doing so unlike acoustic monitoring that's passively listening to any bats that would fly by and echolocate acoustic monitoring um sorry radio telemetry only gives you information on those tagged individuals so you have to catch them first and these batteries shown here in circled in red they're very small tags and so they don't last very long it's a very different kind of information but it helps fill out the picture and just as an example this is a chart showing locations of where some of these receivers stations were located in 2014 and one individual bat tagged in harpswell made not too far where from where I'm sitting now you know flew really back and forth along the coast quite a bit and you know in a 36 hour period went all the way to Massachusetts it came back and if you listen to Dr. Grudel's talk from from I believe two weeks ago on bat on birds you know he's he noted some of these same things the birds are not necessarily moving in one direction during the fall and similarly bats appear to be moving around quite a bit during the fall so again as this network expands this has great potential to help understand where bats occur and how far the behaviors of individual bats as they as they move through the offshore environment and and tagging individuals obviously also gives the opportunity to figure out a little bit more about their behavior where are they roosting what are they what are their temporal patterns and this was a photo of a little brown bat roosted in a rock crack in the scutic peninsula by a cadet you can see the hills of Acadia in the background again showing that these bats are right up on the shoreline and you know capable of making long distance flights across water so it's not surprising that bats do occur offshore and we don't yet have enough spatial information to know that if there are certain parts of for example the Gulf of Maine that have more or less bat activity but at this point it's reasonable to assume that anywhere a wind energy plant could be built in the offshore in the Gulf of Maine there could be exposure of bats to those projects so to figure out you know is that a problem potentially some of the data that we collected at Buies may be most relevant so this is a photo of one of the Buies in the NERA who's the Northeast Regional Weather Monitoring Network central these are the Buies that you can log into and see the wave height the wind speeds and we were able to deploy bat detectors on five or six of these Buies and a particular example of two Buies in the Gulf of Maine shown here with Portland Maine per scale really I think gave a good example of you know how when bats occur and how they might interact with wind turbines so this is a way of portraying acoustic data on a time series over dates so shown here that you have the the upper plot is Buoy B and the lower plot is Buoy E and the black circles represent how many bat calls were recorded the blue is representing night and the yellow is representing daytime so you can kind of go from left to right and top bottom and sort of see not only what times of night are bats active but terms of day and you know first off there's not many dots in the yellow which which aligns with their nocturnal behavior you know occasionally they do show up a little bit before sunset or a little bit after sunrise particularly offshore but by and large most of the activity is occurring at night and again the seasonal signal is primarily during you know late August early September so what I've done here is taken just the dates in August and if you start to think about okay is there potential for impact at turbines the missing ingredient here is what the weather was doing and what that obviously affects what the turbine would be doing and whether or not it's operating I'll mention this later but unlike songbirds and other things that can collide with fixed objects bats appear to really only be at risk when the turbines are spinning and so if the wind speed is low enough and the turbine is idle you may not have impacts so when you when you add wind speed to these figures and this is a lot of information here but we can talk through it the color of the squares now represents wind speed so blue and purple is you know essentially calm winds greens are getting into the two three four meters per second and yellow and red are you know five six seven plus meters per second what you can see is that the largest black circles indicating lots of bad activity are really occurring when it's not very windy whereas during a windy night you have a lot less activity so you know this is representing what the wind speed is doing at three meters per second sorry about three meters above the surface so I think it's a bunch lower obviously where a turbine would be but it gives you some sense confirming you know the lighthouse observations from decades from centuries ago that bats are in fact primarily occurring offshore when there's not a lot of wind so I've mentioned some of these things already but you know the patterns that we've learned from threshold wind farm fatalities occur primarily during fall again mostly these migratory bats this is a silver-haired bat shown here and there's concern for certain species namely the hori bat but the cumulative mortality across the industry could be a threat to the population's viability of certain species and it's important the critical piece here I think for bats is that risk depends not only on the bat being there but also on turbine operation so when you turn a wind turbine off even if there's a lot of bats flying around you can you can remove risk unfortunately this also removes the ability to generate wind power and so the real critical question is are bats occurring when the turbine would be on and when it would be generating power and so turbine behavior is optimized for generating electricity and the potential to generate power goes up exponentially as a function of wind speed and these are some theoretical power curves for these larger turbines of the type that might be built offshore and you can see that they really don't get fully cooking they don't make their full output until the wind is you know approaching eight ten meters per second although there is generation happening down here at all wind speeds above three to four to five meters per second and so the critical piece of information to evaluate whether bats are actually at risk is at what wind speeds are the bats occurring and what would the turbine be doing at those wind speeds based on what we know from terrestrial projects there's actually quite a lot of variation in how a turbine performs and whether it's spinning or not during calm winds there's not again as much potential for energy and so there's not as much consistency it seems among turbine manufacturers as to you know whether they'll be rotating or not so there's there's quite a lot of research going on now for terrestrial farms of how can you by what extent can you minimize and reduce fatality through what's called curtailment or preventing turbine operation at low wind speeds and or using deterrence whether they be acoustically based or using some sort of visible or ultraviolet light to try to repel bats from an area and I do think that most of what we learn from terrestrial sites will apply for the offshore environment because really it's it's about a bat interacting with a turbine in the air I don't think it will matter tremendously whether that interaction is occurring over water or over land but obviously the the frequency of bat presence offshore may be quite different than the frequency of bat presence at terrestrial and farms so what we think we know is that risk to bats is a function of exposure to turbine operation and this potential of exposure does decline with distance from land but it probably still is a possibility even for for a wind farm farms that are well offshore exposure varies with weather and bats um bats are more active during the fall and during periods with warm temperatures and low wind and there's seasonal variation and again it's primarily these long distance migratory species so the biggest importance for the offshore wind industry is to figure out you know how what's the magnitude of potential exposure and how does it compare to terrestrial wind I think we will rely on a bit of that comparison and if we can show using something like acoustics mounted on an offshore turbine that the amount of exposure to turbine operation is well under what's occurring at terrestrial wind farms it'll help us estimate the amount of risk and amount of exposure happening or potential fatality occurring offshore as others have mentioned in previous talks it's extremely hard to count fatality events or collision events at offshore turbines particularly when what you're trying to count is in the neighborhood of 30 grams these are obviously very large machines and it requires quite a bit of either complicated and expensive technology or extrapolation so a large another thing that I'll mention briefly is the potential for attraction to turbines we think this is occurring at terrestrial wind farms we don't know at what range that occurs but it's certainly a possibility that if bats see something as novel as an offshore wind turbine they might go over and check it out and we don't we need to know how far that process may occur and then what how that affects the the fate of those bats that might get attracted to the wind farms and do these very large turbines like we'll see offshore interact differently with bats than the relatively smaller terrestrial sites so briefly again the tools we have to look at this I think acoustics are probably one of the most useful and most readily available for looking at the when bats occur and what the turbine would be doing at that time but we also have the modus network and there have been telemetry towers placed on these offshore turbines these are photos by the way of the block island wind farm and then there's a combination of several different technologies and there's rapid there's a lot of investment right now in a combination of radar and video and thermal imaging based technologies to actually video interactions between birds bats and other things with turbines and it's possible we'll be able to actually count fatality events with these technologies and really right now there's there's a lot of research going on the Department of Energy is just is funding a large-scale long-term monitoring effort to look at offshore wind on wildlife including bats and the wind industry is really actively taking a role in trying to look at this problem most offshore wind farms are conducting monitoring to figure out how often bats occur and I think the important thing with these surveys is to be thinking about how we can use the same information to manage risk if it turns out that the fatality rates are of concern offshore the way that they have been for trestle wind farms and here's a link in a scannable code to the the full report that we drafted for the Department of Energy a few years back I've also included a few references these two books shown here are really widely ranging and they're they're the address birds bats and lots of other wildlife with wind so if you really want to take a deep dive into this I recommend tracking these books down and with that thank you for your attention and hopefully we have some time for some questions Dr. Peterson that was fantastic thank you so much this has been something really incredible information presented today there is a lot that we are learning and still need to learn about what's going on offshore and and how offshore wind may plan I'm hoping you could stop sharing your screen if you could and we could get to some questions we are at time but I'm I'm here to keep going Dr. Vampirez had to excuse herself to her previously scheduled appointment but let's get to some questions starting here from Eliza this is Eliza Donahue watching our Director of Advocacy at Maine Audubon could MODIS technology be used offshore at a scale that would help bone the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management identify offshore lease locations in the Gulf? I think the the detection range of the MODIS network is largely a function of antenna design there's a lot of work going on and modeling detection ranges but but they can operate on the order of I believe you know 10 to 20 kilometers or so depending on a lot of variables so the challenge before there's a wind farm is finding a place to put these antennas you know once you have turbines you know turbines are relatively I don't want to say easy but they're they're a feasible place to put equipment there's been it's there's a steep learning curve in getting these these systems to work reliably offshore so before there are any projects built it's pretty hard to deploy this stuff in the offshore environment but I think there are there's a lot of work now to try to put the antennas on ships but it's a lot easier to deploy these things on a fixed platform and so I think it it's something that will be very useful as some of these projects are constructed it's a little bit hard as a predictive tool and I think the pace of development will is such that there will be essentially what we call the platforms of opportunity you know when the wind company like you know they're when biologists get involved they see it as a great spot to put monitoring equipment right so there there has been a willingness by the industry to to host these these various technologies and the MODIS network would certainly be a good one to to use great a question from me which I am allowed to do because I'm the host do do either MODIS or the acoustic monitoring tell you what elevation the bats are flying at so that's a great question acoustics will in that you can only detect a bat out to about 30 meters so you can you can with relatively high degree depending where the detector is we don't usually have an opportunity to deploy a vertical array of detectors just based on logistics the MODIS technology it's something that's not super straightforward but I believe that something by orient orienting antennas a certain way and by by having a network of antennas I believe it's possible to get some degree of flight height flight height is a lot easier to measure directly with technologies like radar the challenge there of course is you don't you don't necessarily know what you're looking at so height is a tricky one visual high definition video gives you flight height but it doesn't work at night so that none of the things quite match they're about gps is gps trackers give you an elevation or is that just a point they do they're too big to put on bats for the most part it's it's a tricky one um it's you know again it's we know that bats do go that high they're from european studies when you see bats offshore when they're out there during the day they tend to be quite low but then they've seen them increase in altitude when they encounter a turban um so that's not a very satisfactory answer well that's it's good to know what we know and what we don't know a couple of similar similar questions here from diana and wanita is do do wind farms in other countries or in other parts of the world country share information with us are they are they doing similar monitoring and do they let us know what's what they're finding yes so I mean so most most wind farms whether they're terrestrial or well whether they're in the us or in europe do fatality monitoring studies those those studies usually find their way out into into the public one way or the other so there's within the us there's certain entities like the american wind and wildlife institute um amalgamates a lot of these studies tethys.org I should have put a link to that for the offshore world that's a great resource for for everything from birds bats marine mammals and so they the aggregate publicly available information there's not a lot of great data from bats offshore in general there it's again it's it's a challenge to monitor them and it's a challenge to count and so europe is his way ahead of us in terms of offshore wind energy deployment but we're all limited by sort of the same technology as far as monitoring collisions and relatively speaking we have better data on things like gulls larger birds they're just easier to see um to see a tiny bat or songbird at the scale of a modern wind turbine you need a very high resolution camera and you need extremely advanced algorithms to to to identify a target that small so we nobody's got a great handle on collision rates for bats offshore and I think we'll have to rely on some extrapolation from an easier to use metric like acoustic exposure all things being equal it's relatively easy to collect that compared to an actual collision event yeah great thank you so I'm just going to do a couple more questions and I want to note the comment from my colleague Eliza in the chat about you know wondering about the cost effectiveness of buoys versus boats versus you know other methods to get predictive data you know we at main autobahn really want to make sure that we know as much as possible and that you know locations are chosen for eventual leases that minimize impacts as much as possible so the more we know the better of course and then I do want to say too a question from Barbara about resharing the references in the last slide I I can I will send an email to the attendees when this is over and I can include right the PDF or or link to those references Trevor thank you very much yeah and and and if if nobody else has put it certainly include the Tethys website okay because that I mean all of again you can find all of our reports there but if you go there and search for bats birds that's I think the best database of information that I know of and it also includes quite a bit from European studies got you great so I'll just end on this final question from Bethany a technical question about what methods do you use to process your acoustic files your software and which what percentage were manually vetted so we were kind of old school in this project and we looked at every file auto identification has come a long way since we started this project but we were very cognizant of not wanting to make sure we were modeling actual bats and not something that wasn't the bat and so we still to this day mostly look at most use a combination of automatic automatic identification versus visual but all of this offshore work was was visual identification and it's I mean there can be some uncertainty as to whether something is one species or not but it's relatively easy to say whether something's a bat or not and that's something I didn't mention but because they are I could look at in the ultrasonic environment there's less noise in that environment than there is in the audible spectrum so it's very it's comparatively more difficult to get information on birds using acoustics because you've got wave noise wind noise all the other noises that happen offshore and really other than bats the airspace is pretty silent ultrasonically as long as you're not near a mechanical noise and oddly enough turbines themselves don't seem to produce a lot of ultrasound so it is possible to get good information acoustically using bat detectors even on an operating turbine. Outstanding well this has been excellent thank you so much Dr. Pearson thank you in absentia Dr. Perez for folks still watching this will be available from the recording on our website and you can sign up for our final presentation next Tuesday Dr. Peterson thank you so much for joining us and thanks everyone for attending. All right thank you. Bye.