 So, I'll just get us to underway with a few housekeeping items. I think that might make sense to start with, and then we'll turn to committee introduction. And then I'll turn it over to our co-chairs for any introductory remarks that they'd like to make if we're getting underway. So, just to get us started again, a few housekeeping items. COSA is a standing committee of the National Academies for constituted to provide ongoing individual input to bone science and assessment programs. In other words, the individual members of COSA provide input on their own behalf and not on behalf of the National Academy as a committee. They produce no written deliverable. I'm going to ask again to please mute yourself if you're not speaking. All right, as mentioned, COSA is primarily focused on providing input to both science and assessment programs. So, that's the perspective with which we will address the topic today. We will be recording the open session of our meeting. Again, I ask folks to please stay muted unless they're called upon to speak. If need be, we will try to meet you from our end. If it seems like your audio is creating any disruptions or interruptions, but again, just as a courtesy, we ask that you please try to stay on top of it so that we don't have to monitor that. As the moderator, I will invite participation by audience members if and as the time allows, but primarily I will be providing some priority to COSA members, invited guests, and bone staff, again, calling on other members of the audience if and as time allows. Recognizing that this has been a topic of interest, you know, we want to emphasize the importance of civility and constructive discourse in order to call on individuals to partake in the conversation. I will be using the raised hand feature. So, I think most folks at this day and age are familiar with Zoom enough to know where this is, but if you're not, if your screen is maximized, you should have at the bottom a reactions tab, you can find the raised hand feature there. If your screen is not maximized, you may have three dots with the word more underneath. If you click on that, you should see a list that includes reactions and you'll find the raised hand feature there. That's how I know to call on folks. Again, I will be calling, giving some priority to COSA members, invited guests, and the bone staff members, but I will also engage other members of our audience if and as time allows. We do have scheduled break, but if you need to take a break at any time, please feel free to do so. We just ask that you turn your camera off and keep yourself muted so as to not create any distractions. I think those are my housekeeping items. So we'll turn now to our committee introduction and I will start with our co-chair Scott Cameron and Rod Mather. Hello, everyone. I'm Scott Cameron. I'm a geologist. I live on the northwest coast of Washington state. I spent the first 32 years of my career working for Shell Oil, mainly an offshore oil and gas projects. And the last 10 as a consultant, I've been a member of COSA going on now six years. Good day, everybody. My name's Rod Mather. I'm a historian and archaeologist. I work at the University of Rhode Island and I co-direct a graduate program that sits at the intersection of anthropology and archaeology and history. And I have been on COSA about the same at the time as Scott, I think. And before that, I was also part of the FACA advisory committee for four years. And I'm very much looking forward to today. Thank you. We'll turn next to Jack Barth. Good morning, everyone. I'm Jack Barth. I'm the professor of oceanography at Oregon State University. I'm a coastal physical oceanographer. I've been involved with lots of ocean-observing efforts, both on the east and west coasts. And at Oregon State, I direct a program that unites everything marine, natural sciences, social arts and humanities, called the Marine Studies Initiative. Thank you, Jack. I don't see Rona on the line. Is Jeremy Fierstein along with us? Don't you see him either? Okay, we'll keep moving to Dr. James Flynn. Hi, my name is James Flynn. I'm an atmospheric scientist with the University of Houston. I've been doing atmospheric research for about 25 years now, and I'm a new member on this committee. Hi, I'm Catherine Eichen. I'm a professor of marine biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And my main research takes place in the Arctic, but also the Gulf of Alaska. And I've been on COSA for, I think, all of a week. Thank you. And I'm skipping a few folks that I don't see on the line, but we'll come back to them if they do join. Hi, I'm Susan Parks. I'm a professor of biology at Syracuse University. My research focuses on marine mammal biology and acoustic communication and the impacts of noise on marine mammals. Thank you, Susan. Carrie? Good morning, everyone. Carrie Pomeroy, a research social scientist with the Institute of Marine Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. My work focuses on the human dimensions of fisheries and broader coastal marine policy, including space use coordination in the ocean. Nice to see everyone. Thank you. Kevin? Hello, everyone. I'm Kevin Stokesbury. I'm a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in school for marine science and technology. I'm a marine ecologist and fisheries oceanographer. Thank you. Lori? Hi, everyone. I'm Lori Summa. I am a geologist also. I spent the first 30 years of my career at ExxonMobil. And the last six years adjunct at Rice University and UT Austin and permanently make my home in northern New Hampshire now. And I am also a new member of COSA. Thank you, Lori. Mary Louise. Hi, everyone. I'm Mary Louise Tremens. I am a professor at Yale University. I'm a physical oceanographer with a research focus in the Arctic Ocean. Well, thank you. And if any of our other members join, we'll be sure to have them introduce themselves as well. I just wanted, oh, it sounds like Les Kaufman. Les have you joined? Yeah, hi. Excellent. Go ahead and introduce yourself. We skipped over yet. Oh, Les Kaufman, Department of Biology Boston University, COSA member for the last year. Thank you. And I'll just, for those that are on the line that are not COSA members or bone staff, I just wanted to point out you've heard a lot of very diverse expertise. I think this is reflective of COSA's broader objective to be informative to COSA, excuse me, to bone science and assessment programs and just reiterate the breadth of portfolios that bone managers. So lots of broad expertise coming to the table. Today's meeting is, has a more of a topical focus than many of ours. So I'm sure you'll hear some critical outside the box questions coming from this group. With that, I want to briefly turn it over to our co-chairs, Scott and Rod, for any introductory thoughts or remarks that you may have as well. And then we'll get underway on the agenda. I'm going to go first. Yes, happy to welcome everybody. I want to thank you all for joining us. It's going to be an interesting day. Thank you to the COSA members, ones that have been here for a few years and the ones that have been here for a few hours. We know that you volunteer your time and it's very much appreciated. I also want to thank the staff at the National Academies and also at Burm for helping put in all this together and particularly for our outside experts that are joining us today. And we're very much looking forward to your input. This is an opportunity for us to think about the important topics of Marines, whale strandings and the science and assessment that goes into thinking about those issues. COSA is of course constituted to think about and help with science and assessment. So we'll be focusing on science and assessment. And it's also perhaps an opportunity for us to think about the way that the science program is working in action. The way in which bone has been able to provide the kind of science that is necessary for understanding these important issues and think about what kind of science and assessment need to be conducted in the future. So I'm very much looking forward to today. And with that I'll pass it over to Scott. So I think Rod captured both our thoughts brilliantly. Thank you so much, Rod. And I just, the only thing I would add is, in addition to the excellent agenda we have for today and kudos to all the folks who put it together. We will get a visit for those who stick around part way through the program from the new director and we're looking forward to hearing her comments. She's new on the job. So just like a lot of our COSA members and we're looking forward to greeting her. And then tomorrow for those who choose to stick around for a second day. We will be widening our attention beyond just the wind energy projects to look more broadly at some of bones programs. And one of the things we're going to talk about tomorrow is a recently completed study by the National Academy on helping bone become a first in class science and assessment organization in the environmental field and I welcome anybody who wants to sit in and hear, hear some of that in the open session tomorrow. So back to you Stacy. Thank you. I will just note that as we get underway, we will be asking our speakers to please introduce yourselves before providing your presentation. We have a tremendous number of folks on the line. And unfortunately, we can't do introduce sections for everybody, but certainly as we march through this agenda, I want to make sure that our speakers do take the opportunity to introduce themselves before their presentation. Our first presentations are scheduled to start and to focus on the offshore wind site characterization activities and analyze impact from agency reviews. That will be brought to us by Brian Hooker and Erica Satterman. And I'm going to again, turn it over to them and ask them to each introduce themselves prior to their presentations. So I think Brian's on the line. And Brian, I believe you should be able to share your screen. So I don't know if you have any presentations you'd like to pull up but you're welcome to do so at this time. Otherwise, I will. Oh, I see Erica is actually sharing your screen Erica will you be going first. She's she's going to drive. She has more. But I think my slides will be the first so I can introduce myself first actually we can probably introduce both of us as we start on this on this title slide. I don't know if that's better but is Brian Hooker. I am the biology team lead within a poem's office of renewable energy programs. So our office is the one responsible for reviewing well issuing leases conducting assessments of activities that may occur on those leaseholds and and ultimately approving construction and operations plans with with terms and conditions of approval. Erica did you want to introduce yourself now or do you want to wait until your, your slides begin. Oh wait, you go ahead. We'll go we'll we'll jump into the next slide then Erica, and it sounds like there are a lot of newer members of COSA so maybe this isn't repetitive. But this is the rainbow diagram that I'm sure some of you at least are perhaps very familiar with. For today's purposes I think we're going to focus perhaps more on the left hand side of this of this slide, because I think a lot of, there's a lot of concerns around pre construction so activities that occur prior to bone actually receiving construction and operations plan, which is in the orange and red to the to the right of the diagram. So as a reminder, the first step in, in any of bones activities is what we term the planning and analysis phase. So that's when we have our, you know, our task force interstate governmental task force meetings, identifying, you know, potential wind energy areas, and then ultimately determining you know what areas within those wind energy areas, we might actually lease. And again, the lease is just the opportunity to submit plans so it's grants the less see the right to submit a plan such as a site assessment plan for the installation of a met tower or meteorological buoy, which is the more common way to assess the wind resource. And then ultimately at the near the end of the process the ability to submit a construction and operations plan that's what the exclusive right of that lease does. But prior to us issuing a lease bone looks at through our environmental assessment process, what the reasonably foreseeable outcomes of issuing a lease might be. And that includes pre construction site characterization activities so these are the surveys that are done to determine where they might deploy a meteorological buoy, and ultimately where they might, you know, site a cable where they might want to site. So that's what I'm highlighting there is, you know, where our first environmental assessment our first endangered species at consultation occurs at this very early stage, prior to lease issuance. So through this consultation, and through this NEPA assessment is where we apply and the terms and conditions of the lease. So every lease has a section. The Addendum C oftentimes that lists all the measures necessary for the protection of the environment so there's a lot of measures in there for avoiding impacts to marine mammals and other endangered species from activities that may occur prior to bone receiving a plan. And the reason that this is like this is that bone does not have a permit authority under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. So the, the way that bone regulates how activities may occur for activities that are not part of a Again, a site assessment plan or a construction operations plan is through those terms and conditions of lease identified in the lease. And again, those are developed through these consultations that we do prior to lease issuance. So then we move on from that phase and we actually then, you know, award a lease, the lessy may begin at that point to do some surveys to support a site assessment plan. This may be what we call reconnaissance level surveys. So surveys that they're going out. They're just trying to get a sense of, you know, what's out there. They might want to specify an area where they might want to deploy a buoy or a meteorological tower if they want to propose a meteorological tower. And then that data then supports the eventual submission of a site assessment plan. A site assessment plan isn't even necessarily required. It's just the ability to go gather that wind speed data that oftentimes is necessary to get financing for a project. So click again, Erica. So here, here's where we actually get into the much later in the process. We get a construction and operations plan. And at that point, we consult again on all the activities that may be part of the project development. So in this case, there may be, you know, site characterization surveys that are done after the construction begins to show like where the facilities have been actually laid. So post construction surveying to look at, you know, where the cables are aligned, make sure that all the cables reached the appropriate burial depth. Investigating, you know, scour, scour protection measures around foundations or cable protection measures along the cable. So we do assess again, at the construction operations plan, other survey activities that may occur basically for the life of the project. So I just really wanted to highlight those those two areas in our review process. Okay, next slide please. Thanks Erica. So again, what I really want to stress is that, you know, again, prior to these issuance bomb assesses the impacts and consults with the services on the reasonably foreseeable activities that may result from these issuance against site characterization and site assessment activity. The home does not have permitting authority for site characterization activity, and thus we look at those through conditions for these activities are addressed in the lease. The only permit that is issued for site characterization activities is from the from NIMS from the requirements under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So we do have, we do look at what lesses are proposing, and, and ensure that they are meeting the other statutory obligations such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So, so if you actually were go to the NIMS web page they will have a list of all the permits under either incidental harassment authorization or letters of authorization that they have issued under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So what the home does do, and it requires as a part of a term and condition of, of site, a term and condition of the lease is that they submit a survey plan to us for our review. The purpose of Boehm's review of that survey plan is to ensure what they are proposing is within that programmatic environmental assessment and ESA consultation that we did at the time of these issuance. If we receive a survey plan, we are reviewing it primarily from that perspective of, is there anything proposed here that wasn't covered in our consultation. And if it is then, then, then there's no objection to the plan, it's simply a object or no object type of decision that's done at that point of review for that, that survey plan on Boehm's site. And later on in the process prior to approval of a construction operations plan, Boehm then assesses and packs again and consults with the services on the activities proposed in that plan. And again, that one is more specific because it's not not programmatic at that stage, that's, you know, really the details of what they plan to do for that construction operations plan. Okay, next slide. So we often get questions on, well, what has Boehm adequately assessed and we've, we've been assessing the impacts of pre-construction activities since the, since the beginning of the program. So Boehm first assessed the impacts of offshore geophysical surveys back in 2011. And this was, that's the date of NIMS concurrence, letter of concurrence on our assessment at that time. I believe that was in the mid-Atlantic. Then again, we initiated consultation. And because the way that we were releasing, we kind of folk, we did this mid-Atlantic regional and then we did a regional in the southern New England area. So we did, we consulted in 2011 on the mid-Atlantic and then 2013 in the New England area. And then again in 2013, we had this initiative that we were, and that's the image to the right, was looking at all geophysical activities across all of Boehm's programs from the Sand and Gravel, the Marine Minerals Program to the Oil and Gas Program, which at that time there was the consideration that there might be some oil and gas exploration, I think primarily in the southeast US. So again, we took all of Boehm's programs and assessed them in that programmatic EIS and biological opinion that was issued in July of 2013. And then in, you know, there were some, you know, potential hangups with the July 2013 biological opinion, I think there was potential some litigation and some other issues. So we were wanting to again unify all of the northeast assessments in another consultation. Again, we updated that in September of 2017. And then finally, the current programmatic consultation that we have in place for geophysical surveys that covers all of the northeast region from basically Virginia to Massachusetts is in the, in parts of Maine, excuse me, Gulf Maine, is in the June 2021 programmatic letter of concurrence. And again, that was ended up being informal. We did have a lot of mitigation measures that we that we have agreed upon since the beginning this process in 2011. And that we felt comfortable and positive about that we could reach a not likely to adversely affect in that June 2021 version and that is available on our website. And again, again, you know, through this experience through the years, all of our assessments have included, you know, vessel strike avoidance measures, high resolution geophysical survey operational measures such as clearance and shutdown zones. And there's a link there that provides can bring you straight to, you know, those assessment documents that we have done. You know, throughout the since since 2011, including the most current programmatic consultation that we have in place and that lessee is our following. Okay, move on the next slide. This slide is is really I think we can as you might imagine is I think was mentioned in the the outset we've been getting a lot of questions about, well how long you know when did bone surveys started when did the lessee surveys start. And I, I struggle with that question because surveys have been going on, you know, on the Atlantic, you know, for decades geophysical surveys have supported safe navigation, you know, both Noah and the navy conduct those. And, you know, sand resource evaluations that that volume or the Army Corps of Engineers have done to look at sand and gravel borrow sites along the East Coast. So there is really, there's no before and after is what I struggle with in in some of these requests that we have. And matter of fact, the, the image on the right, I think was just, you know, just to show this is 1939 to 2011. Again, showing just survey work that occurred prior to boom ever even issuing the first, the first lease. So this is 72 years of primarily I think federally sponsored surveys that's available on from from Noah's website in CEI track line of geophysical surveys, because again, I struggle with the question of when did, when did lessee is first start So there is no, again, there, there has always been at least some level of survey activity in the Northeast for, for decades. Specifically, so but even if I were to go into, you know, well, how about just surveys that are supporting offshore men. Federal agencies have funded surveys prior to these issuance. And an example is, this is just an example other states have done this as well besides New Jersey, but New Jersey funded geophysical surveys in 2009 as part of their ocean wind power ecological baseline study. So they were looking at, you know, potential lease areas, you know, through the state federal task force process and other processes that we had going on, even prior to these issuance. Again, just to highlight that there hasn't, there's not this, you know, before, before surveys occurred and after surveys occurred. And again for context here, January 26 2011 is when the first lease was issued off of Delaware, and that was a non competitive lease. And then again, in 2013 in September, the robot Rhode Island, Massachusetts leases were executed, and March fifth, excuse me, March 1 2015 is when the New Jersey leases were executed. And so again, you know, as I mentioned in that continuum timeframe, anytime after lease issuance, you know, we may have had, you know, some, you know, beginnings of site characterization activity. And again, oftentimes reconnaissance level surveys. At the beginning, looking at, you know, perhaps where the meteorological glue was going to be put so some general idea of what the lay of the ground was. And then leading up to, you know, much more detailed surveys, when the, you get closer to the submittal of a construction and operations plan because you need those detailed surveys to support the submission of a construction operations plan. So roughly, you know, surveys to support a SAP or those reconnaissance level surveys began around 2015 in the Northeast Air Northeast region, and cops surveys began more around the 2018 time timeframe. That's when some of the southern New England projects will first beginning to submit survey plans to support their construction operation plan submit. And more specifically, if we get asked, you know, how many, you know, permits, you know, have been active in this past winter. And we had about seven active permits, seven active survey plans over this over the 2223 winter period throughout all of the Northeast region. And I think that is it from my slides, again, just to provide the context on our process and where we are today regarding survey activities to support offshore wind leasing activities. I don't know if we want to pause here for any questions before we go into Erica's slides or one way to the end. Yeah, I'll look for hands for maybe one or two quick clarifying questions before we turn to Erica. I see does got his hand up. Yeah, hey Brian thanks for that. Quick question is, is Eric are going to go into what, what all those sources were for all these surveys, or just in general terms what what kind of surveys that we're talking about in geophysical I will be going into that as best as best I can Doug I will. Super. Okay, I figured as much. Thank you. Not a problem but yet no very good point there's there's geotechnical surveys which is you know includes like comb penetrometer tests. And the borings and the geophysical tests, the geophysical surveys include everything from multi beam side scan sub bottom profilers but Erica will be going into all that equipment and more detail and hers, her presentation but that's the range of types of equipment that are used. I forgot magnetometers. Brian, I see any other hands but I'll give folks maybe just one more moment for any quick clarifying questions. Oh, right go ahead. Hi Brian thanks for if you've got data on intensity of surveys, there's been many more surveys in the past decade than the were in the previous two or three decades. No, I, I, we have not. I mean, I can speak to that there's been more geophysical surveys to support offshore wind, as we receive more and more construction operations plans. And thus there's been surveys to support those so there definitely has been an increase in geophysical surveys to support offshore wind since 2011. And I think that it is in the context of all the different types of surveys that are occurring on the OCS. I do not, do not have that. But in terms of federally regulated activities. This is the intensity of survey increased federal regulated activities in the past decade past 20 years. Unfortunately, again, I can only speak to, to offshore wind. You know surveys, you know, I know that there have been other initiatives like post hurricane Sandy for instance, you know that was on the main mineral side where there was a lot of surveys funded by I think different institutions to go look at Santa Baro sites during, during that time. There's, there's lots of different initiatives that I know from the federal perspective that have occurred probably over the past few decades. But I can really only speak to the poems renewable energy program which, again, I will say that yeah since 2011 there have been an increase number of surveys to support construction operations plan but I don't have that full context to give in relation to, you know, other federal agencies whether to know the Department of Defense or what happened. Thank you. Thank you will take Scott and then less and then we'll move on to Erica's presentation and take additional questions as time allows when she wraps up. Scott. Brian that was a very helpful overview. Thank you so much. I'm just wondering in where in the process of renewable energy, permitting assessment would assessment of seafloor hazards and serve and geophysical surveys to assess seafloor hazards come into the into the, into your program. Yeah, that's a great question generally that occurs I think as part of the surveys that are done to support the cops submission. So, although I think some of the methodologies using some of those early reconnaissance level surveys can identify, you know, those hazards that is a requirement and bone regulations that that information be acquired. I believe though that we get more of that type of level of detail in some of those later, you know, surveys to support a construction operations plan submittal process. The reason I ask is that of course, early during the leasing phase, if you identify potential hazards that could be potentially show stoppers for development offshore, it would be ideal to figure that out. And therefore, lots of money is paid for bonuses lots of investment is made in in surveys, and, and, you know, power commitments are entered into. And so I just hope that comes on to your radar screen I also recognize that there is a new act passed by Congress the disaster planning resiliency act that might have some implications for, or particularly for seafloor hazards in your program and I hope that gets on to the radar screen. Thanks for that. Well, I will point out that very good point I remember, you know, from the very beginnings of the of the program, you know, there's a is the option of like, well should the federal government be funding the surveys right you know at you know early on should the federal government obligation to to survey prior to leasing. And it was determined that it was, you know, something that we didn't want to all the taxpayers have to pay for that have the less ease, you know, incur that cost, as part of the developing the site. And it was just a, you know, there's just a decision that could be made I think other agencies throughout the globe, you know, have different approaches to that. But that was that's the approach the US has taken is to, you know, shift that responsibility on to the, on to the less ease. Thanks for that clarification. We'll take a quick question from less and then we'll move on to Eric's presentation. Yeah, thanks Scott. I mean Brian, sorry. I'm playing around with the viewer. And one thing that's clear is that multi beam data are course there's a grid but it's course and multi beam followed by visual inspection is probably going to be needed for anchoring points on any floating when installations because of the potential of hitting coral or emergent reefs, even in mud basins. And what responsibility will that be? Will that be on industry and will we have access to the data generally? That's a, that's a great question. You know, we have done in some cases we have done, you know, our own surveys, I know we've worked closely with, you know, the National Ocean Service to, you know, on some of the deeper sites where there might be some deep water coral and stuff to do some reconnaissance on the actual survey on where the, you know, there's a higher likelihood of deep sea coral or other resources, sensitive bottom resources. So it's not that there's an absence of data, but we just, the federal government usually isn't doing that, that high level, you know, very detailed like you're referring to the actual anchor location. This area, if it were to be leased with would need potentially a higher level of survey. Boom, then, then both on the environmental side and on the engineering side, look at that data to look at what may be impacted from, you know, putting an anchor or some sea floor disturbing activity at that particular site. And that is at a high level included in our NEPA assessments and consultations that we do at that, at the cop, at the cop stage. As far as data release, that's a bigger question that we should probably have a whole nother topic on when, when data might be available, especially at a very high resolution phase we do have information on regulations that, you know, for bomb received data, we can release it. I'm going to forget the exact number of years after a project has begun. And, but there's also initiatives I know that to voluntarily have the less he's really sat at an earlier stage. But anyway, those are kind of ongoing discussions that we can certainly have by bringing our engineering group to talk about that. Thank you Brian and Scott. Hi. Well, hi everybody. My name is Erica Statterman and I'm in bone Center for marine acoustics so what I'm going to be talking about more is the study of these high resolution geophysical sources which are used insight characterization. So I'll be approaching this more from our science lens from our CMA we call it Center for marine acoustics. So on the phone or aware, the issue of underwater noise on marine species has been an issue for bone for decades and there has been quite a bit of research that bone has supported over the years. This topic initially was coming up over issues with Navy sonars and marine mammals, and then there was a lot of focus on potential impacts of seismic air guns. And overall this time these high resolution HRG sources were used across bones programs they've been as Brian said to other oceanographic mapping efforts, but for our oily gas program and marine minerals they've been used for quite some time. And they were generally not thought to be a concern but to be sure bone initiated several studies that we did it sort of in tandem so the first one that came out was this report. We call the cracker and Fred Antonio report where they carefully measured sound levels of a number of these sources in a laboratory setting with really carefully calibrated instruments. And that provided some really good information about the source characterization source characteristics. Then they took that work to the field and those were the Heaney and Halverson reports. And then most recently, myself and some co authors from bone and the USGS published a paper characterizing these HRG sources, putting it in context of whether we thought that they were likely to exceed the threshold for behavioral harassment in the MMPA. So this was the first time that we still really focused on the physics and the technical nature but we put it in context of a biological receiver. And here's just a screenshot from our paper all I have the full citation at the end of my talk. So what are the actual sources that are used for site characterization for offshore wind so Brian mentioned geotechnical that's where they're actually sampling the sediment and pulling up cores and things like that, but then the geophysical sources that they're using for offshore wind are these HRG high resolution, they're generally described as being non impulsive and that's important because impulsive sounds typically are thought to be more damaging to auditory tissues. That's because of the rapid rise in pressure that you see with impulsive sound sources. So most HRG sources are non impulsive. They're all considered to be intermittent with low duty cycles that means that they're on for short periods of time with silence in between as you're listening for the return signal on your vessel, and they're directional, and have lower source levels than seismic air guns which are the sources used in the oil and gas program. So I went in preparation for today's talk I went through some of the recent IHA applications that we've seen from these offshore wind less ease and these are the type of sources that we're seeing. So two of the sources that are impulsive are boomers and sparkers, but then we're seeing chirps of bottom profilers, parametric sub bottom profilers and then quite a few systems operated above 180 kilohertz. And you'll see in my subsequent slides why this is important but it's generally considered that above the hearing range of marine mammals these sources would not be considered to be impactful. I do want to note with the multi beam echo sounders there are some multi beams that operate at 12 kilohertz, those would be within the hearing range of marine mammals, but we are not seeing those for offshore wind applications thus far those would be really reserved for deeper water. So here on the shelf we have not been seeing any 12 kilohertz multi beams in the applications thus far but sometimes they'll use really high frequency once. Okay, so now what I'm going to do is actually show you all a video from that sort of summarizes the results of our paper at a high level. And then I'm going to get into much more of the technical nitty gritty details of the paper in the subsequent slides so hopefully this synopsis helps keep you all with me for the ladder slides so here we go. People use underwater sound as a tool for exploring the ocean, such as mapping geological features on and beneath the sea floor, measuring the number of fish, and finding appropriate places for the construction of wind turbines. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOLA, analyzes these sounds to determine how and where they should be used in order to avoid harassment of marine species. Two US laws, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act, require specific protocols to avoid or minimize harassment of marine animals. Regulatory agencies provide guidance on acoustic limits. If the sound level is above the threshold when it reaches an animal, it may result in behavior harassment of that individual. If an animal is exposed to a sound below the limit, it would not be considered harassed. We classify these sound sources as de minimis, meaning they have minimal impact on marine species. These thresholds are useful, but they only focus on how loud the sound is and do not include other important characteristics of the sound source. A recent study completed by BOLAM and the USGS closely examined high-resolution geophysical sources that are typically used to map the sea floor. The study characterized and classified a suite of sound sources based on their potential to affect marine species. The first characteristic was the frequency or pitch of the sound. Some resources transmit sounds that are above the hearing range of most marine mammals and are considered de minimis simply because the animals cannot hear them. The second factor is the amplitude or how loud the sound is when it reaches an animal. Normally, the amplitude is defined as the source level from the device generating the sound, but sounds lose energy with distance, so by the time they reach an animal, the received level could be below the threshold, meaning the source is not impactful. Also, it's unlikely that a marine mammal will encounter an area where sound levels are high or significantly disturbing. Even in areas with very high densities of marine mammals, calculations show that a single individual would rarely receive high sound levels. This indicates that some louder sounds may be considered de minimis under most conditions. The width of the sound dean is also an important consideration in determining the impact of sound sources. Omnidirectional sources radiate sound energy equally in all directions, but many high-resolution geophysical sources have sound beams that are more narrow and only insonify a small part of the water column. Therefore, some acoustic sources can be considered de minimis because they only insonify a small volume of water and thus are unlikely to be encountered by a marine mammal. Finally, it's important to consider the total duration of a sound source as it passes by an animal. Many high-resolution geophysical sources emit very short pulses of sounds. The number of pulses relative to the animal's position and the speed of survey vessels are used to determine the total duration of sound that an animal may encounter. Most animals will receive such a short total duration of sound that it can be considered de minimis, especially compared to all of the various sources they hear in a typical day. By evaluating these characteristics of active acoustic sources, most high-resolution geophysical sources, such as those used for surveying areas for renewable energy or sand resources, can be considered de minimis and are unlikely to result in harm to marine mammals. The findings of this research help agencies to determine which sources require regulatory review and mitigation, such as protected species observers to operate safely around marine species and which sources do not. This provides us with a more complete understanding so that BOEM can confidently deploy high-resolution geophysical systems in support of the agency's mission to manage development of energy and mineral resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way. To learn more, visit BOEM.gov. Okay, so hopefully you're all with me and we'll be able to carry with me on the next subsequent slide. So, like I said, in this peer-reviewed paper that we published last year, we evaluated the following factors when considering the current behavioral harassment threshold for marine mammals, which is 160 dB relative to one micropascal. I do want to note that that threshold is used for all marine mammal species, and that differs from the Level A threshold, which we would be considering for auditory injury. That is a weighted threshold that considers energy accumulation versus this one, which is just a single exposure. So, I'm going to go into each of these in the subsequent slides. Okay, so the first one here is transmission frequency. It's our simplest metric, but I'm going to walk you through this figure because we'll see it a few times here. So on the horizontal axis, we have the transmission frequency, and on the vertical, we have the source level, and you can think about this as how loud a sound is at the source. Each of the dots here represents a measurement taken from that Crocker and Fred Antonio report, and the reason that you have multiple dots per source type is because they played around with different settings. So they would test out different transmission frequencies or durations or power levels for these sources, because a lot of the sources can be tuned based on the needs when you're out on the water. So they wanted to experiment with the range of settings that you could have. So each of the boxes here, I've just clustered them together based on the source type, so it's easier for viewing. Okay, so like I said, previously consistent with current practice, it's considered that sources that are transmitting above 180 kilohertz are not considered to be audible and thus not likely to affect marine mammals. And in those recent IHA applications, they actually haven't even analyzed sources above 180 kilohertz. So by this logic, we can put a line here at 180 kilohertz and sort of gray out everything above it in the de minimis category. So that would mean some of the multi beam echo sounders, some of the split beam echo sounders and some side scan sonars could be considered de minimis based on this factor alone. Okay, now what about how loud the sound is so I'm going to translate this into what we call the incidental take radius. So conventional practice assumes that animals are not going to approach within about 25 meters of a sound source and that's usually because they're aware of the vessel and will avoid it. Or because there might be a marine mammal observer on board and they could shut down the source when an animal comes within a certain distance. So if you think about how loud could a sound be at the source in order to reach that 160 DB level at 25 meter distance, you can do a simple calculation of propagation loss and get to a source of 188 DB. So this is because sounds lose energy with distance so just because of the distance alone you're going to lose that much energy. So this would mean we could draw a line here at the 188 DB mark and say that okay sources that are emitting sound below this level could be considered de minimis. But we actually wanted to ask a question of this is this 25 meter distance reasonable, and what does this actually mean when you're out on the water, what are the odds of even encountering an animal based on the densities of animals out there. What we did is actually calculated an incidental take radius so we combined the population densities of different marine mammal species with the probability of a single animal being in sonified above 160 DB. And we calculated what we call the incidental take radius. We actually do this. We did this using a Monte Carlo approach so what you do is you start with a distribution of animals, a random distribution based on real world density so we took that we did this in turn for each of the marine mammals found on the Atlantic and you can do the simulation, you know, hundreds of thousands of times so you're getting these random distributions over and over and over again. And you can ask the question, what are the odds that an animal will fall within a given radius of the source so if you're playing with the size of the radius, you know how many simulations would you have to do for animals to fall within that radius. Specifically, we asked for what size radius would you have a probability that a single animal is inside the circle in 1% of our simulations. And we chose this single animal at 1% because we felt it was a very conservative metric, and we wanted to see how that would pan out if we are looking at the densities. So from there when you get your, your radius you can then convert that to an adjusted source level like we did with the previous 25 meter case. So what does this actually look like when we're thinking about the densities of animals we see out there. So, if you start on the right hand side with densities of sperm whales let's say this is a relatively rare species, you see the maximum densities they get are around six individuals per 100 square kilometers and that's just north of Cape Hatteras. So I'm just going to sort of plug that in over to this figure on the left, and this is showing individuals or density per 100 square kilometers so you know five or six individuals that would land you somewhere around here. And if you go up along the vertical axis showing that take radius, you see you're actually off the chart and that's because the density is just so low for the species. I should point out that the red line here represents that 1% chance so the 1% of the simulations a single animal would be within that radius. So it's a little hard to conceptualize with a really rare species like sperm whale but if you look at something a lot more common like the Atlantic spotted dolphin, you can see the color bar has changed here and the maximum density is 75 individuals here along the coast. So, in that sense around here with 75 individuals you go up to that 1% line and you're about 80 85 meter distance. So that would be an acceptable size of a radius. Okay, so you can see that the density of the animals really matters here, and you can get different results for each species depending on their density. I'm going to show you similar data in a slightly different way in this next plot. So on the horizontal axis we again have density of animals but this time they're labeled so you're more rare species are on the left, and then the more common species on the right. The red line again represents 1% of the time, one animal will come within that radius. So if you look at something like a North Atlantic right whale and you can see that based on their real world densities and this is by the way the maximum of any place on the OCS at any month of the year so we use the maximum worst case across the board to get here. And you can see that you could have a radius bigger than 200 meters and still not even in sonify a single animal 1% of the time. So before these radii can get sort of unreasonably large for the really rare species so in order to be conservative we kept it at 100 meters so if you look at the 100 meter contour you can see for for many of these species you're below that 1% chance. All right, so now going back to the previous plot. I just want to reiterate that it's a combination of source level propagation loss and real world animal densities that matters. The practice of using 25 meters is very conservative based on realistic animal densities by capping it at 100 meters that corresponds to an adjusted source level of 200 DB. So we can then shade out here, and we can see that some additional sources like the lower powered sparkers boomers and bubble guns, the toad sub bottom profilers which were de minimis prior to this but again, and then also the communication that actually aren't pictured here but those are some of the things used for communication between instruments underwater. Okay, so this is our second factor and you could see yes additional sources could be considered de minimis here. Now let's move on to factor three so beam with this is important because not all of these sound sources are radiating sound equally in fact they're quite different. Sources like sparkers which are omnidirectional are going to be radiating sound in all directions and have an higher odds of in signifying an animal. But if you look at a narrow beam source, maybe a split beam echo sounder or a multi beam that produces sound in a really narrow fan. You can imagine just just the odds of even encountering an animal the odds that an animal swims right into that sound beam are much lower for the sources that are not omnidirectional. So just based on likelihood just like in the previous factor, thinking about likelihood of insonification based on the source level and the radius. In this case it's likelihood of insonification based on being with. So we know then that animal densities will play a role. So again we took a Monte Carlo approach with this. This time we simulated the animals in we distribute them in three dimensions, because depth was something we wanted to explore. And we vary this by each species that we looked at, and you can see that for a given source, your odds of insonification are going to increase with greater water depths and that's because the diameter of that cone of sound is going to increase with depth. So closer to the source you have a smaller odds of impact, whereas for deeper water, you have a larger volume and sonified and thus a greater potential impact of insonifying a marine mammal. So depth is important. So is animal density, and so is being with so bringing that all together into one figure we're looking at this type of figure again with animal density on the horizontal beam with on the vertical and then each of these colors represents a different depth. And the different results from the simulations. The blue line here again represents the 1% chance that a single animal is insonified for all of the realizations that we did for this model. And you can see that for the rare species like we saw with sperm whales and right whales with less than 10 individuals per 100 square kilometers, you could actually have a pretty large beam with before you would have the odds of insonifying an animal 1% of the time. For maximum, we summed across all the species of marine mammals that are out there the highest density months the maximum you could possibly get is around 350 individuals per 100 square kilometers. And in that case your beam with would be much smaller if you were in that kind of situation. You can also see that with shallower water you could get away with a larger beam with, but as that water depth increases, you need to be more careful and focus on a narrower beam with to reduce potential impacts. So, pulling it all together I just want to reiterate that it's a combination of beam with water depth and real world animal densities that matter. You can have a large beam with an areas of low density and still not insonifying animal, but in order for that to not become unreasonably large we again kept that at 35 degrees. With that logic, anything under 35 degrees could be considered to minimize so that would include the whole mounted sub bottom profilers, the ADCPs and split beam echo sounders. Okay, so bear with me where it were three out of five here. The next one is total radiated power or sound power level. What does this actually mean. So, when we're thinking about the sources and the previous two slides I was talking about really the odds of encountering an animal and the odds of insonification but now we need to think about what would happen what kind of energy with the animal receive if they were insonified if they did encounter that source. And it's important to keep in mind a couple of characteristics about sources it's not just about source level. It's about source level and directionality. So, we're introducing a new metric here that we call sound power level, which incorporates both the source level and directionality of the source and then you do that by taking the integral of the whole sound field. The reason we're looking at this is because it helps to address the question with a single metric. What is the difference between a loud source with a narrow beam versus a quiet source with a broad beam. So I'm going to walk you through a couple of examples so again with our omnidirectional source radiating sound in all directions. If you look at the radiation pattern so this is degrees on these two axes. You can see that it's radiating a source level of 205 DB in all directions. But then when you get you do the calculation you take the integral and turn that into sound power level and it's different units here so we're looking at Watts instead of. Yeah, so it's a completely different unit and not directly translatable but you're going to see my point when I bring in the next sound source that it's a significantly lower number. Okay. But then when you look at a directional source like this one with a seven degree cone. In this case, it has a higher source level it's 227 DB, but that's really only directly under this name beam so in the other parts of the sound field there's actually very little Okay, so a higher source level after doing the math to get you to sound power level you end up with the same sound power level. So the point of this slide is to show you that two different sources that have different source levels end up with similar sound power levels. And these may seem like subtle nuances between the different sources but they really are important when we think about how it could impact animals out on the water so this is why I'm going into all the details of these pieces. So to read it reiterate the point on total radiated power by incorporating the source directivity with the source level you get a more complete sense of the total radiated sound field, you can sort of think of this like the average over the whole sound field. So what did we do with these sources and thinking about whether they'd meet the de minimis criteria, well actually nothing with this factor we didn't think that factor for alone was enough to render a source de minimis, but it was such an informative metric that we wanted to weave that into the next factor, factor five, and we do believe that in the future, potentially a new shift for regulatory practice could be to incorporate this metric because it is very informative for some of these directional sources. So let's move on to the last factor, hopefully you're all still with me. All right, the last one we call degree of exposure. So thinking about for how long or for how many pings an animal would be exposed to sounds over 160 dB. And at the beginning that a lot of these sources can be tuned in certain ways. So you can play with the power level you can play with the pulse link the duty cycle, and these are all typically done based on your needs of your survey so what kind of water depth you're working in what kind of substrate you're trying to penetrate all of these things matter, but they can really affect the way that an animal would potentially be insonified and the likelihood of insonification. So we did another little modeling exercise here where we're looking at the number of pings received above this behavioral harassment threshold, looking at source characteristics which I described previously. Also vessel speed so we're looking at typical speeds of these survey vessels, and also the position of an animal relative to a source. So this is a little sort of schematic diagram showing a vessel moving a 10 kilometer swath across the ocean. It has a source that's shown in red here, and we position an imaginary animal here either 100 meters or 1000 meters below that source. And in these assumptions the animals directly under that main sound beam so again sort of worst case scenario it's not adjacent or off to the side it's really hit it getting receiving the main strongest pings from that directional source. We didn't have any particular rationale to think about how many pings would be acceptable but we wanted to see whether there were any potential natural splits in the data when we were looking at these different sources and the number of pings and animal would receive. So this is what the plot, the results look like. So on the horizontal we have the number of pings above 160 DB. And on the vertical we have that metric I introduced previously the sound power level so remember it's incorporating both the directionality and the source level. There are two dots for each source, the open dots represent the received pings at 100 meters depth and the closed ones are at 1000 meters step. So what you can see here is that there is actually a natural grouping of sources, many of these lower power directional sources cluster off to the left here, whereas these higher power omnidirectional sources are up and answered off the chart. So by this logic we consider that these sources could be considered de minimis because you're there are so few pings that animal would receive typically it's less than 100 pings. I'm going to show you what this looks like for a couple of specific sources on the next slide. So, these are the type of results we got that we then brought into the previous plot. So here we're looking at this 10 kilometer distance so the animal sitting at position zero and in these three instances it's at that 100 meter depth. So, if a source was to travel directly over an animal again the animal stationary with this assumption, which probably isn't very realistic but if they were to sit right underneath for a multi beam echo sound or this is one of the ones that is operating at the audible frequency range. And these are very powerful sources in the direct beam but keep in mind at 100 meters depth the width of that beam is less than a meter. The odds of instantification are low but if the animals and sonified it would encounter three pings above 160 DB. But then you think about the pulse length of the signals and the total amount of time that that sound would be on for is less than 500th of a second so they're incredibly short signals. So even if the animal did encounter the three pings that's the total sound exposure it would receive. In contrast that's something like the hall mounted sub bottom profiler. That's lower source level, but in this case the pulse length is longer so there would be 17 pings above 160 DB for a little bit higher sound exposure 1.1 seconds. And then a three plate boomer would receive even more pings but again because of the extremely short duration of the pulses it's again receiving about 0.05 seconds of total sound above 160 DB. These factors really do matter all of these subtle differences and like I said a lot of times the user can tweak things so we do need to think about operational considerations and ways that we can minimize potential impact based on just what are the needs of the survey and what are the ways we can use these sources that will lead to the least impact to marine species. So just recapping the sources that we found to be de minimis based on this factor where the multi beams split beam echo sounders, three plate boomers, side scan sonars, hall mounted sub bottom profilers and several other instruments that are used for understanding the water column typically. Okay, so now I'm going to just bring it all together and recap our five factors. So first one factor one was the audible frequency 180 kilohertz factor to incidental take radius that 200 DB threshold there factor three beam with rendered the hall mounted sub bottom profilers de minimis factor for we didn't use for any of the sources and factor five degree of exposure rendered some additional sources de minimis. So then, where does that leave us what is left so if we look at everything that's not great out. We have the highest powered sparkers, the one and two plate boomers, and some of the bubble guns and then of course any sources that we weren't able to evaluate in the paper should still be considered under this framework so we wouldn't of course automatically assume they'd be de minimis they need to go through this analysis. I want to mention a couple of points that we didn't even bring into consideration in this paper. So the first is, and for context today. The higher powered sources these highest powered sparkers and bubble guns are not typically what we're seeing used at least on the shelf with offshore wind so I did look back at the recent IHA applications like I mentioned before and the higher powered sparkers that we're seeing out there are 600 to 800 jewels and that typically corresponds to a source level right around this 200 DB line. So it's really the 2000 jewels and higher sparkers that are that are up here at the top of this box. So that's just some context to consider the other thing that we didn't explicitly bring in were other biological factors like auditory recovery time, you know what's happening to the animals hearing systems in between those pulses, or in other words, aversion or avoidance behavior on behalf of the animals, and also auditory integration time so it's generally considered that if an animal receives a sound that's significantly shorter than its auditory integration time that it would perceive the sound is having a lower source level. So we did not explicitly consider that here but it could be woven in in future regulatory practice. We did not explicitly consider mitigation when we were building out these factors and this framework, but I do want to talk about mitigation just briefly on this next slide, because in the paper we did propose a framework for tiering of sources. So this was what we put into the paper we have yet to hear back from our colleagues at National Marine Fisheries Service about how they would incorporate the results of this paper into future practice. So as we proposed here, I haven't mentioned it previously the paper did include an assessment of air guns and those would could be split into tiers one and two based on the volume of the air gun. Those would require full suite of mitigation and IHAs of course. Tier three are the ones that we were not able to deem de minimis so those would be your higher powered sparkers and some of the boomers. They would require marine mammal observers and shutdowns if animals come within a certain radius. But we believe that if those mitigations are applied they would be unlikely to result in incidental take of marine mammals. And then for tier four based on the results of the paper we believe that these sources could be considered de minimis without even needing mitigation because they're so low impacts that we wouldn't require that. So these are many of the sources that I showed you today and that are being used out there for offshore wind site characterization. So like I said this was a framework proposed in the paper, but I do want to reiterate that current mitigation used by boom in our marine renewables program requires mitigation for both of these tiers. So current practice does require mitigation for both, even though we believe based on the results of the paper that we probably do not need mitigation for the tier four sources. All right, so where does that leave us. Based on the science available and the information that we have at hand we believe that we do have adequate information to assess the degree of impacts from these sound sources, and that the current mitigations being used should be more than adequate. And what that means for us is we're really putting our areas of focus in other directions that are more potentially more impactful and have bigger bang for the buck if you will. I know that Jill is going to be getting into some of our future science efforts from the Center for marine acoustics, and the right well strategy so I think I'll actually kind of skip over this but I just want to highlight that we are really focusing on some of the, the more impactful sound sources like pile driving and then some of the other species groups that are really not as well understood like impacts to fishes and invertebrates. So, there's a lot we could unpack even just in this final bullet point here but I think I will stop there. Just wanted to show this slide with the full citation to our paper which was published in the Journal of marine science and engineering and his open access. And then this on the right is a screenshot from something we just completed. I wanted to put it up on the bone website but I'm happy to share it upon request. We call this our sound source list and really this is just a sort of encyclopedia level description of all of the sound sources that bone regulates and actually some additional ones as well, like vessel noise. And we put this out there because we wanted people to be able to have a place to go to really understand the sources so it's definitely not as technical as the paper. So, even marine mammals or any other species it's purely just a physics and sort of operational description of the sources so that is a really good resource if people want to learn some more. So, that is my last slide, and I'd be happy to take questions. Thanks. Thank you, Erica. I'll take a moment and look for any additional hands for questions for Erica. We will prioritize questions from the committee and our invited guests, and then we will take additional questions from the audience if in that time allow. I see Kevin Stokesbury, Michael more than Susan Park. Hi. Thanks very much. Thank you for the presentation. I'm still I guess because I'm not as familiar with the DB's and stuff. You're, you're talking about Erica. Of course, you're using the speed of sand and water right not in air. Yeah, yeah, and for the sand rages is 180 you're saying that it doesn't, they can't hear above 180 or 180 the frequency 180 180 kilohertz. The pitch of the sounds that's the, you know, the tune of the sound, rather than the amplitude. It's a different metric. So the, so it's not the DB then because I thought a sperm whale's click was about 200 DB's. Yeah, the DB would be the amplitude so how much energy the sound has that's different a different metric than frequency we typically for a lot of sounds we have amplitude and frequency and actually a way to think about that would be like, well, never mind I was going to do the music analogy but never mind. It's essentially the amplitude is is how loud the sound is versus the frequency which is the pitch of the sound. So they're they are different metrics. Okay, so so the DB, the maximum DB you're saying was was what again, could you Well, it depends. It depends on the source but we're finding that based on spherical spreading and the densities of animals that allow a source could be as loud as 200 DB and be unlikely to result in incidental take. Really. So, and is there a difference between the DB in the air and the DB in the water for that measure. Yes, for sure. All of those units are different well frequencies not but all of the amplitude metrics are different because it's different. It's all compared to a reference pressure and the reference pressure and air and water are different. Right, so don't have the top of my head have an analog for you I'm sorry of how loud is a source of 200 DB and air. I don't have that off the top of my head we could we could come up with that though. Okay, thank you. Sure. Thank you. I'll turn next to Michael, then we've got a number of other folks with their hands up will do Susan, less got Francine and then Katrina and I'll remind folks of this order as we go but Michael turn it to you next. Thank you. My name is Michael more from what solution a graphic institution. I am not an acquisition. I'm a dead whale biologist. However, my question of Erica is whether or not the. She talked about the potentially the longer distance for concern for endangered species like a right well. And my premise is that as the rarity of the species increases one should value the individuals increasingly to the point where they're extremely endangered to infinity. So has I haven't read your paper but has the modeling really taken that issue into consideration and as much as is that 1% encounter risk still valid for an animal where was any 100 or 300 or whatever it is left to the animals and so that's that's really my question. Fair question. That gets really much more into the regulatory and policy realm the paper was trying to not get too far into that so I will say in the paper no we really just looked at odds of encountering an animal, not based on. Well if you did you know how detrimental to the population that would be a subsequent paper that focusing more on the conservation goals and the risk to the species. It's been my sense, it's been my sense that the sort of encounter management the dynamic management piece which is what you're using for observers and so on becomes increasingly irrelevant as the species becomes rare and rare and the sort of provision of mitigation over broader scale becomes more important and so that's that's what I was going with that question. And I believe Brian could correct me on this but even as we we showed in the paper for most of these sources we probably don't even need mitigation but for the ones that we are using mitigation like for sparkers. They have a larger radius for right whales if they're detected then they do for other marine mammals so in that sense yes that sort of sense of risk is taken into consideration I'll just say in the paper we didn't we treated it all just as a encounter like we had based on the densities. It does. I mean, I think the principle of saying okay the value of an individual right whale is breaching infinity is very helpful in terms of thinking about these kind of questions in general. Thanks. Michael. I'll turn next to Susan, and then last, Scott Francine and Katrina. Great, thank you and thank you Erica for going through a presentation walking through the paper. I did have a chance to read it before the meeting and I, I just wanted to ask a couple of clarifying questions, really focused on the factor to that you used for sort of considering sources to be this. So for clarification when you were doing the species density modeling for the probability of exposure. Were they randomly scattered it take into account the clustering of the behavior of the species right like, for example the dolphin species you mentioned traveling pods so you would never find a single dolphin, or right whales at high density are clustered in groups foraging in a small area. So did it take into account that clustering or was it just random spacing. I'm pretty sure it was random it was our colleague, the lead author who did those Monte Carlo simulations I'm pretty sure it was random but what I know what she did is always took the maximum density of any month at any place on the Atlantic OCS. So for example when right whales are congregating up in New England at their max density that would have been the number we fed in to then do the random. So it's almost like you had that many right wells across any part of the OCS which also isn't reasonable but we wanted to do that conservatism so it doesn't quite get at the animal behavior and how they're hanging out in groups but at least it built in that hopefully a bit of a buffer there. Okay. Yeah, I mean I think that is a bit of a problem that needs to be addressed right because like if a right well density is, is, you know, 35 right wells per 100 square kilometers but the all those right well actually within one kilometer. That doesn't make sense right because you're actually diluting them. That needs to be taken into consideration a lot in that model. And then the second part for factor two that I wanted to ask is you talked about using a 25 meter range for the spherical spreading but then you were talking about directional sources so spherical spreading doesn't make any sense. So I was concerned that the specific source that was considered de minimis. Is that a directional source or a spherical source that was below, you know, and when you're going below 200 BB. Yeah, the, well, the sparkers and our omnidirectional so they were above the threshold there was a one. Right out the toad some bottom profilers those are directional. They're not like as narrow as some of the other ones narrow beans but I'm forgetting the beam with off the top of my head if one of my co authors is on the good time and. But yeah, that's a fair point I believe we did. We looked at spherical spreading for all of them I cannot remember if we did a comparison with cylindrical spreading. So we certainly could and that would probably affect the distance I know that some recent measurements done by the USGS that haven't been published yet we're showing that they were actually seeing spherical spreading for a lot of these sources even in shallow water which was a little bit surprising. But that isn't fully available yet so yeah that's a fair point. I'm ready. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure because spherical spreading wouldn't be appropriate for directional source. So thanks for the clarification. Thank you so much for your questions. Let's and then Scott and then grand scene. And I think Katrina mentioned in the chat that her questions have been answered from prior. Did the last drop off. I'm sorry, let's just go there. He's still there but when he put his hand on he went away for me to go ahead less, you're muted though. Less you're muted. We still cannot hear you. Yeah, I get a lot of that. Thanks for a really great presentation. My, my questions really overlap with Mike and Susan. And I've been, I've been concerned about the fact that when we model Wales, using reasonable assumptions about what they do they seem to read what we've done and then do something else. Particularly right wells. So I'm a little concerned about the rate of update of observational data that would be needed to keep our models credible. In fact it converges on just we need to look all the time. Yeah, well that actually feeds in really well to another objective that bone has in terms of monitoring over the next couple decades maybe that was a softball that you knew you were going to be but we are working on standing up a large scale regional monitoring program, using some of the statistics but also working with many other partners for other observation methods to have essentially a continuous observations out there of these species. Some of them will be transmitting data in real time some would be archival but then hopefully processed in a systematic way that we can make them available more quickly than what's typically done so I know that the team at Duke is working on how to build in real time observations into their Duke density models which I forgot to mention that's what we used here. So that is possible we might be getting more regular frequency of updates of those models. So we're working on that we're working on building that out. And I think Jill will speak about some of those initiatives a little bit later. And did you have a question that was more of a comment right. No, what I have a question for you offline because I'd like to incorporate this into the EBM models, but we can. Sure. And way to draw, way to draw the connection from earlier coach the conversation. Scott and then Francine. Thanks Erica great job. I have two questions. One that one of your closing slides that a lot of your your workers really focused on getting better calibration and potential tiering thoughts for shallow water surveys but as the OEM is moving more towards floating wind, thinking about the west coast and the Gulf of Maine which have big wind resources and will require floating wind. What do we need what other work do we need to do in deeper waters what other research needs to be done in deeper waters. What are those bomb doing about that. That's question one. And then, and then question two is, if, if we were to take your recommendations about kind of saying that certain certain things that are currently require certain surveys that are currently requiring mitigations in under your tears would not what do we have any historical calibration data, a look back to see what part of the program would, would no longer require mitigations with the impact be would it be like 50% less 60% less. Those are my two questions. Thanks. Okay, the first question. Sorry, I'll go with the second question first. I don't know if we, well, we probably could dig that up in terms of how much you know what percentage of the previous surveys would no longer have needed that. I can say that for sure our marine minerals program they're using more of these least powerful directional sources and they've typically been using mitigation as a precautionary measure but they probably wouldn't need to moving forward. If the renewables program continues to see these high well, I said in previously they're not seeing high powered sparkers in the shallow waters they probably don't need the mitigation for that but with the more powerful sparkers that we may be seeing in deeper water so getting into your second, your first question, or if they're starting to see other additional more powerful sources in deeper waters then yes they should have mitigation there so I think what's the one of the takeaway messages from the paper is that the behavioral considerations matter a lot it's not just you can't say one single source like oh a multi being either is or isn't or oh a spark or is or isn't it's really about how is it being used which power settings is it set at, you know what's the frequency all these things really are very important. And another thing I forgot to mention one of my closing remarks is that the current threshold for behavioral harassment at 160 dB. If that threshold were to change if that came from NIMS. We could rerun the analysis in the paper and yes we would get different results and that would affect our mitigations. That's that's how we should do it. But the factors that we introduced in the paper we think those would stand because those are really the analytical approach we use to classify the sources so. Yes thresholds could change is sources could change new sources could emerge that we've never even considered before and we could run them through this analysis and then get to the results so I think that's sort of one of the takeaways is that we've built up this framework that hopefully people will find useful even though I admit the paper is very technical and challenging to read. So hopefully the video helped. Oh, yeah, I don't know if I got to your questions well enough, but for Gulf of Maine just we have to see what sources are actually being proposed and see where they shake out. I think. Yeah. I did, I did just put it in the chat, you know, we have done, you know, looked at what potential sources might look like and deported on the Pacific and events of the Pacific leases. So I just put the, the biological assessment in there so we did we have done some canvassing of the types of material equipment that would be used in deep water and the for the purposes of issuing those leases in California. I'll get Francine the last question and then we'll wrap up before taking a break. Thanks Stacy and hi everyone my name is Francine Kershama senior scientist with a natural resources defense council that I'm speaking on the panel later today I'm very happy to be here. Okay, thank you so much for that detailed presentation I found in front of my helpful. You know, I think you just partly answered my question but I'll make the point. Anyway, which was about the behavioral harassment thresholds and just noting that, you know, best available science is indicating that marine mammals maybe behavioral responding and potentially being harassed. You know, 120 BB 131 clock. So I was wondering if you have a flaw that at all in this analysis, just to see if those two or three and two categories changed at all. It sounds like maybe you haven't but it's set up to be able to do that. Right. Yeah, we didn't explicitly consider those other levels in this we built it all around the 160 but the way that we built it could be that number could be changed and could still run the analysis so it is flexible in that sense and I think we even had a remark like that in our conclusions paragraph was if this were to change in the future, then there you have it this is how we would suggest people take a hard look at the sources, using this framework. So just looking at the agenda now we are scheduled to take a 1230 to one o'clock Eastern break. And I will adjourn us to do so momentarily but I just wanted to make a few quick comments and reminders before we scatter. The first is when we return we're going to be departing slightly from this topic we will be hearing from the new bone director Liz climes. This will be code the first opportunity to engage with the new bone director and we're very excited about having the opportunity to do so we had the opportunity in the past to meet with the last director and found that very insightful in terms of understanding the priorities and expectations so we're looking forward to doing that at one o'clock from one to 130 and then we'll return to this topic with some additional presentations from no as well as additional presentations by phone and then this afternoon at 315 will be having the panel discussion and additional questions as well. So we invite folks to stay on the line and to continue the conversation with us this afternoon. We will be returning back promptly at one o'clock for that discussion with the director and we again invite folks to stay on we will be using the same zoom link so if you do log off for lunch please log back on using the same call in information that you use to join here. With that I will thank you each I'll ask folks to be sure. If they're not logging off to turn off your camera and your audio while we are away we will pause the recording and resume it once we get back. Thank you each. Alright, welcome back. It's one o'clock and I just want us to be sensitive to the time. We have with us. I see she's on the line the new director of bone Liz Klein. And I don't want to waste any time I know this committee is really eager to converse with you and to understand your priorities and your current thinking. So with that, I will turn it over to you to introduce yourself. And provide any remarks that you'd like and then we'll open it up for some discussion. Great. Thanks so much to see can everybody hear me. We can hear you well thank you. I hear nods. Great. Great. So yes, I am Liz Klein, the director of Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. And thank you so much for inviting me to join you today it really is great to be here, whether it's morning or afternoon wherever you are good morning good afternoon. And thank you to all of you for your continued contributions to making bones programs stronger. And the expertise you provide is really invaluable and I'll just start off by saying we're grateful. So grateful for your service on this committee. And I am especially happy to be joining you today I looked at the calendar and noted that it's my official two month anniversary with bone. I could tell you how long it feels now it's been great every day has been great. And in that two months and so I'm just, it's a really exciting time at poem and we have a truly tremendous team so I'm honored to be of service in this role right now. And while I am new to bomb just by way of introduction I am not new to the department interior actually was previously serving a senior counselor to Secretary Holland, starting at the beginning of the Biden administration. And I also served in the Obama and Clinton administrations previously so have combined a little over 10 years experience at the interior department so. I'm not familiar with it but know that I learned something new every day which is part of what makes it exciting. And through my experiences at interior, I've become keenly aware and have a great respect around the importance of science informed decision I have been fortunate to work during administrations and for interior secretaries that do really value the importance of data and science and informing everything we do. During the Obama administration actually when I was at the in the deputy secretary's office. We put together a new and revised scientific integrity policy, which was held up as a real example of the valuable policy across the federal government. Aimed at the core principles of supporting scientific expertise maintaining high standards and facilitating transparency so those are all values that continue to be shared deeply by this current administration. So I'm very appreciative of the independent scientific advice that Boam has received from COSA, since it was established in 2015. The advice on broader policy and the very important advice you provide each year for our study profiles is truly valued from the beginning and the President and Secretary Holland have been clear in their belief that we can turn the climate crisis we face into an opportunity for the country. I've been reading news reports today about the IPCC coming out with its latest sort of synthesis report I haven't seen it yet actually, but, but it is really, you know, something that we take very seriously and we know that we can use this as an opportunity to certainly at Boam, take a leading role in transitioning transitioning the US to a clean energy future, one that confronts climate change creates good paying jobs and ensures economic opportunities are accessible to all communities. So a little bit about some of our, you mentioned priorities here at Boam certainly helping to build a thriving domestic offshore wind industry is a real key component of what we're doing right now and a high priority we've been working hard to help achieve the nation's goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030 and 15 gigawatts of floating wind capacity by 2035. In just two short years here we've approved the nation's first two major offshore wind projects on the OCS that's vineyard wind and South Fork so we're excited about those and, and hopeful for continued progress there. We've initiated the environmental review of 10 additional projects and issued draft reviews for seven of those, and we know that there are more to come so feeling well on our way to meeting the 30 gigawatt goal by 2030. We have three lease sales last year, and I would just say lease sales you know are certainly a nod to the industry and to the investment community about the strength of this industry in the US. So we have three list last year at the New York bite which was the highest yielding energy sale in history, Carolina Long Bay and the first ever sale off the west coast of California. There was also issued in 2021 a leasing strategy from Secretary Holland that in addition to those sales identified for more that we're working on in the Gulf of Mexico, Central Atlantic, Oregon and the Gulf of Maine. All of that work does not come easily we know that you know of the importance of trying to minimize conflicts with existing ocean users try to minimize environmental impacts and, and I would just say to all of that again just how important the advice and that we get from Cosa is to all of that work. And now of course it bomb as the agency with primary jurisdiction over the outer continental shelf we also continue to oversee conventional energy development on the OCS. And when we do that we want to make sure we're doing it in a way that is as protective of the environment as possible and ensures a fair return to the taxpayer so the inflation reduction act and which an important piece of legislation that we are very excited about here in the administration did direct us to hold a couple of oil and gas lease sales this year, including the next one in the Gulf of Mexico on March 29. And in issuing the final sale notice for that sale we included a number of economic terms designed to encourage diligent development and ensure fair tax fair market value to taxpayers. We also included a number of lease sale terms to mitigate potential adverse effects on protected species and avoid potential conflicts with other ocean users. Another exciting piece of legislation that's occurred during this administration is of course the bipartisan infrastructure law. And in that law poem and our sister agency Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement were directed to develop a regulatory approach for sequestering carbon on the OCS. So that is another effort that we are undertaking developing a new regulatory program for an activity like carbon storage is no small matter. And so we expect, you know, a quite robust rulemaking to come this year, and we're hopeful that we can have a draft rule out on the street in early fall. So our bureaus are working very hard on that and we also are doing that with an eye toward creating a program to oversee this activity on the OCS and doing that in a way that makes sure that we're maximizing safety and have environmental protection top of mind. And so, you know, all of this really, we don't do it alone. We have to, we have to engage with our government partners tribal nations, industry stakeholders throughout all of these processes to avoid impact impacts to ocean users and the marine environment as much as possible. And I don't see everybody's face on the screen but Bill Brown happens to be right below me so certainly our robust environmental program is essential to ensuring that we have the best available science and indigenous knowledge to inform our decisions and so we again I will just say the team at BOM is tremendous and working hard every day on all of these issues. Our partnership with COSA is such a valuable piece of all of that. Again, your role as BOM's independent scientific advisory body really provides us with an important independent and objective scientific perspective. We, again, I'm just so appreciative for your expertise and your contributions for, you know, undertaking this work and providing, you know, really a public service for us and so thank you so much for all that you do. And I think I am happy to answer questions or hear your questions and feedback and if I can't answer them, either volunteer Bill Brown to answer them or take them back and and do some follow up so happy to open it up to questions. Thank you so much director and I'll be looking for the raise hands for any initial questions to get the discussion underway. And thank you so much for coming to talk with us today we greatly greatly appreciate the time you're taking with us and also that overview about the program and some updates was extremely helpful. COSA really is a very diverse group of science scientists who and and I encourage you to take full advantage of the the the talents and experience of this of this group we represent a lot of different different fields of study. Now, you have a huge challenge at bone you not only we've we've focused a lot of our attention recently of course on the wind program and trying to help move that along. That's of course the focus for today's activities. You also have ongoing programs and oil and gas and marine minerals. And as you mentioned you're looking to expand into the new area of offshore carbon storage and carbon sequestration storage, and possibly something else in critical minerals. COSA has expertise that can help you in all those areas I hope you'll take advantage of us. That's that's what we're here to do we're here to help. And we're also I think here to help and the National Academies are in in some some other areas that are on the radar screen for you. I know you've had some aggressive goals relative to wind energy that it has to include floating wind as you mentioned. Two of the four areas that you've talked about for lease sales are going to require floating wind that's pushing into into water depths beyond where it's currently being deployed globally so that's the academies as a whole might be a resource to help us there. Also some of these areas you're looking at lie within areas identified as major hazard areas by FEMA. I'm thinking about Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. And we're here to help you as you have to deal with things like the new disaster planning resilience act which will be coming down the pike towards you so. Again, we really appreciate your time with us and I hope sincerely you'll take take up our offer to help you in whatever way we can. Yes well thank you so much for that I will say. We do indeed have a lot of challenges before us, and we know that we can't do it alone. And we know that you know none of this is is going to come easily, but it really does speak to the importance of having science being one of our guidance and guiding lights as we move forward, and we, you know certainly welcome the opportunities to have others weigh in with us and provide their expertise on the paths that were outlining so thank you very much for that. Thank you, Scott. I'm looking now see if there's any additional hands for questions for director Klein. No, I'll just take a moment to sort of reiterate some of the points that Scott has made in terms of the diversity of our committee. I'll add to that. Just by saying that we've recently implemented annual committee membership rotations and, you know, with the hope of being responsive to your needs. So now the way that the committee operates. Each year we will be rotating some fraction of our membership off and adding additional members on each membership cohort will serve for a three year term. And then with the possibility that some of those folks may be asked to serve on, you know, on for a second term as well. And serve up to two terms on committee on the national academy standing committees. Also just point out that tomorrow we will be having a discussion on additional national academies projects that are getting underway. But certainly we have a long standing relationship with both with the code the standing committee as well as ad hoc projects as well. And we'll be hearing about another standing committee as well as a consensus study that's getting underway looking at the hydrodynamic impacts of wind turbines. So, you know, just really appreciate you all looking to the national academies to help you address some of these issues. And certainly Kosa has served for the catalyst for some of those projects. And we look forward to being helping think through any additional. I see that Doug has raised his hand I'll give him an opportunity to ask a question as well. Doug is one of our invited guests for today's discussion. Go ahead Doug. Yeah, thanks very much they see thank you, director Klein I just just a quick, quick question and comment but first, I'll just take this opportunity to to commend you and and bill and the whole crew I see Rodney and Jill and others that the Boom is is really ready to and has tackled some of these very difficult issues and does so in a very, very deliberate and very measured way which is really, really good in the environment we're in and we need that information as you said that the science is really important but but bones mixture of social scientists and physical scientists natural scientists so on is really a very strong way to move forward on all this. So thank you for that and and that and and that and that agency. My question is really about the leasing, and maybe it's too technical for this, but what's embedded in those lease agreements. In terms of two things one is the ongoing environmental monitor monitoring and then the other one is their, how should we say robustness to changes in in administrations. Right, so without knowing I will provide a clarifying point for folks that we have in our process. We have a fairly robust process through what are what we refer to as intergovernmental renewable energy task forces to help identify wind energy areas that are then set up for leasing, and those leases allow the leaseholders to do essentially give them the right to go forward and put together a construction and operation plan. So it doesn't give them a right to build anything or it's not it's not actually the instrument that's for the construction and operation of the wind farm itself. The leases and have, you know, we have been innovative bomb has I can't say credit, we haven't been here two months but bombs been really innovated in its auction processes in the past couple of years to develop things like bidding for entities that come forward with, for instance, commitments to domestic supply chain efforts. Union jobs. And we recently in the California lease sale incorporated offered bidding credits for those entities that put together tribal communications plans so there's, and there's least stipulations that govern how they can move forward in in their lease areas. So there's, and then you know they they undertake site assessment work and eventually put forward a construction and operations plan that then hopefully eventually leads to a record of decision and then there's in that record of decision, there will be less to mitigation measures, and monitoring requirements, you know, that sort of spell out how they will need to minimize impacts that have been identified through the environmental review process. And in terms of, you know, robustness against future administrations. Well, just in just in terms of the fluctuations I'm not trying to implicate anybody or any party or anything like that just absolutely because they slow down when the administration changes regardless of, you know, the lease instrument itself is, you know, spells out diligence requirements, for instance, right, the holders have up to five years to put together a construction and operation plan. And, you know, their, their, their contracts and so both the federal government and the lease holder have certain obligations under them, similar to a decision being made on a project. And so, you know, the probably best examples of how this plays out in changes in administration we've had some, you know, high profile instances of leases being issued for oil and gas projects, for instance, where, you know, the future administration might be somewhat bound by what's, you know, the lease holder is able to do and has certain, you know, preexisting rights in the offshore wind context. Again, they don't have a right necessarily to use that area for offshore wind unless they're able to put forward a construction and operation plan that, you know, passes muster so to speak and is approved. And so I feel pretty confident about the instruments themselves being durable and will allow for fluctuations in administrations and I think one of the things that we're trying very hard to do in this administration is build up a renewable energy program that is strong and will endure and demonstrate through, you know, we've, I've mentioned we've approved two projects we have several in the environmental review process one of the ways to really ensure long term success is to show it in practice that this type of development is possible in this country has benefits and can be an important source of clean energy moving into the future. And not just from a, you know, climate change perspective, although, you know, many of us feel that's important, but they are, you know, engines for economic opportunity. And certainly they are. There is a tremendous amount of job growth and support for communities that need it right now right so for, you know, port improvements and the types of economic benefits that are possible from these projects. We are, you know, remain hopeful that it's something that can endure beyond this administration. Thanks very much. It was really it was the durability of the instrument and it was hard to phrase that in such a way that I just really wanted to know about about installing a robust renewable energy program so thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you for the question. Hi, director. Thank you very much for joining us. My question is about tribal consultations. I know in the last few weeks has been a couple of national tribal organizations that have called for monitorians on offshore wind and one of that one of their concerns. I think has been to do with the workload, the kind of demands that they are facing based upon the speed and the volume of progress with offshore wind. And while a lot of us think that that's important to push with offshore wind it does seem like there are some questions and concerns about tribal consultation and workload and I wonder if if the government administration had any initial thoughts on on on on those things. Yes. Yes, so we've, we've been engaging throughout with tribal communities both on the East Coast and now on on the West Coast as we move out there. I think you are right that a number of concerns have been expressed about capacity. Tribes, you know, every tribe is different. But there are a number of tribes in the on the East Coast in particular that have expressed concerns about their capacity within their organizations to review these environmental reviews to really meaningfully engage it's one thing to have you know a draft EIS document land on your desk. It's quite another to feel like you have the in house capacity. You know the scientific expertise that that you know all the people and just the people there to to do the work and some of the tribes might have one tribal historic preservation officer for instance and so we have been working to try and find ways to support capacity building within a number of those tribes. For instance we undertook a pilot project with one of the offshore wind projects, where we were able to find a contractor who helped the tribes put together that review the documents helped them put together their work and so it's things like that that we are trying to find opportunities to help them build capacity, and I think that the hope is that we would do that, not just for individual projects but really, you know help build the type of capacity that tribes could use for the future right so not just an immediate short term capacity building exercise but certainly long term as well. We're talking to the project proponents friends, as well about you know the importance of directing engagement with tribes and making sure that, you know, for instance some of the benefits of these projects the job opportunities and the economic development, you know, answering questions like how how are these projects going to help benefit some of these tribal communities and so it's something we're thinking a lot about and continuing to engage with our tribal partners and there are a number of pieces of, you know, the resolutions that were passed that we agree with we agree that no economic opportunities should flow back to tribal communities where we can make that happen it would be great to see more tribal employed on these projects and have the type of pipeline of job growth coming from tribal communities would be really exciting and so that's something we're continuing to work on with them. But broader than that we're also finding ways to make sure that Indigenous knowledge is part of the, you know, sort of the scope of what we're evaluating right and and how tribes find these places, you know their their connection to them, why they're important, what their perspectives are, and making sure that that's part of our evaluation as we're looking at individual projects but also is just a, you know, contribution to the, you know, understanding about these places that it's not, you know, the our oceans are not, you know, far off and separate to a lot of folks they're very much connected to these places in a, you know, in some cases a deeply spiritual and cultural way so those are just some of the things that we're working on now and, you know, remain hopeful that we can can make some improvements moving forward. Thank you very much. Any final thoughts or questions or comments for the director? If not, oh, I see Carrie raised her hand so I'll I'll give her a chance and then I may have a final comment after Carrie as well. Great, thank you so much. It's really terrific to hear from you. Dr. Klein and I appreciated the dialogue all this morning and including the dialogue just now. I'm my focus is on the human dimensions of fisheries in particular in coastal communities, focused primarily in California, I'm a COSA member and I bring a background in the applied applied sociology and anthropology in connection with coastal communities and coastal fisheries. California and other places around the US and a keen interest in the connection between those things and marine policy and organization of space use and its implications for coastal communities. And I know there's growing appreciation for the importance of things like environmental justice especially for underserved communities historically underrepresented underserved. But one of the things that has come up and I guess this is more in a way this is very much a local facing consideration but I think it's actually a consideration throughout the US in terms of making this move toward development of the offshore wind energy industry and that is the identity the social and cultural identity, not just a tribal communities, but of our coastal communities inevitably, they interest in economic opportunities but also an understanding of existing social and cultural and economic fabric of these places. And when introducing a new activity, inevitably there is there's change and change happens right, but I guess I wanted to bring that up. This is a topic of keen interest to some of the folks on COSA, certainly the communities that many of us work in. We've had we, we were happy to have the opportunity to have some social science discussion. The last COSA meeting that we had actually December and then one day a couple of weeks ago. But I guess I just wanted to bring that up, you're hearing about lots of things from different COSA members. And I think I'm hopeful, especially with those the interagency groups, and the connection down to the local level if you will, that in understanding the science of coastal communities, as well as the marine environment and the ecological environment and so on. Just, I guess trying to put that on your radar, or hoping that it is on your radar and hopeful that bones environmental science programs can continue to move forward in advancing better understanding of the implications of these changes for those communities. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing that whole set of issues up. I think it's really important. Sometimes, you know, the tendency in these processes with these issues is to bucket things into their neat little buckets and, you know, surely we can mitigate the impacts to this use or that use or that impact. But the, you know, coastal communities and fishing communities in particular, there is a real sense of identity and, you know, having developed over in some cases, decades and even longer around a certain activity and the idea that another use comes along and could pose a threat to that is really an important issue and one that we take very seriously at bomb, and we have a lots of really fantastic people who think about those issues a lot and think about how we can, you know, move through this time of energy transition and bringing new sources of energy and how we can do that in the most thoughtful way possible, and really making sure that we are from beginning to end looking at, you know, the impacts to other uses of the OCS, but it really is an important piece of the whole operation that shouldn't be discounted by any measure. Yeah, and thank you if I may follow up just momentarily or just very briefly, what you bring to mind and I'm glad to hear it is, and it's something we've been talking about on COSA, are these issues of scale and scope of change. Some of it good some of it not so good depending on where you sit and cumulative impacts, not just of one development versus another or one development plus another but all the other change that's occurring including climate change and how that is influencing the dynamics of these coastal communities and the way ocean, ocean space is used or valued. So anyway, thank you so much. Thank you, Director Klein sensitive to your time limitations. So we won't take up any more of it, but just to briefly reiterate that COSA has recently been thinking about the social sciences we've had two meetings now that have touched on that we want to make sure that that continues to be an ongoing conversation. And as part of that we have been thinking with our bones colleagues about sort of new and novel ways to engage as well, whether that be through smaller group discussions, you know, making ourselves available to both staff on one on one. You know, or, or larger workshops on the other end of the spectrum, potentially spent off studies as well. So what we whatever we can do to be helpful for you as you embark in your new position where we're really glad to be a resource. We look forward to continuing these conversations. And we hope that you'll feel welcome to to join us for our meetings and to update us on any changing priorities or new, you know, new developments. We really appreciate your time with us today, certainly. Well, thank you everybody. And good luck with the rest of your meeting. It really does look like a good one. I'm sorry I can't join for all of it, but look forward to hearing summaries from, you know, the folks, the good folks from bone for attending so thank you again to everybody. Take care. Take care. Thank you. We'll now continue with the remainder of our agenda for our look into the impacts or potential impacts of wind energy development and whales. And so our next discussion is a deeper dive into changing environments for whales. And for that, we have Anna Maria, the Angeles on the line from Noah fisheries. And we'll have Peter Thomas on the line as well from the marine mammal commission. And we'll go ahead. We'll do as we did with the earlier presentations. We'll let Anna Maria get first. We'll take maybe a couple of clarifying questions if there are any. And then we'll move on to Peter's and then we'll open again for questions after his presentation. So Anna Maria, if I could ask you to please remember to introduce yourself. I see you're sharing your screen and it looks great. So I will turn it over to you. Great. Thank you very much. Can you hear me okay. We can hear you very well. Thank you. Great. Okay. Hi, everyone. I'm Anna Maria D'Angeles from the Northeast Fisheries Science Center's Pacific Acoustics Research Group. I'm an acquisition there. I focus primarily on our, our analysis, but I'll be representing our entire group here on the work that we've been doing as in terms of collecting baseline data to understand the shifting citation distributions through Pacific Acoustics. So to start as everyone's well aware, Pacific Acoustics is a tool that's been widely used to understand the movement patterns of marine mammal species. It's been great in understanding historical and current trends of these species as you can revisit the data set and ask different questions at any given point in time once collected. We can understand the timing of different species in different areas, as well as understand just how far animals are from the shore. And all of these things have a natural variability to them that needs to be taken into account before examining the potential effects of anthropogenic sound sources, such as those used in offshore wind energy development. So for this talk, I'm going to be focusing a lot on collecting baseline data and I want to just have us focus on a couple of questions. Mainly, how long does an area need to be monitored to be able to understand change and the source of the change. So there's a temporal component, you need 20 years, 10 years for so on and so forth. And there's also a spatial component to this question, as well as species. Each species may change in terms of how they react to a different sound source based on the area and the behaviors they're performing in that area. So for this talk, I'm just going to go through a couple examples of some baseline data collected to answer or to at least look at some of these questions, maybe not fully answer. So first off, we'll start with some long term bailing whale data sets. So this is work done by Genevieve Davis and at all from 2020 and 2017 papers in which they looked at the distribution of bailing whales along the entire Western North Atlantic. So you can see here on the map that they've divided that region from the north being starting at region number one being gave a straight all the way down to the Caribbean sea being region 11. So that data collected from 2004 to 2014, and it was the result of 281 passive acoustic devices. And for an effort of the scale that's required a village. So there were many contributors to this study that led their data to answer this question, and kind of been done without this collaborative effort. The bailing whale species that they looked at where the North Atlantic right whale and say been blue and humpback whales. And based on the distribution of the recorders they were looking at the presence of these species on the continental shelf and the shelf break. I'm going to go through a little bit of the results. And in terms of the general seasonality. I have an example here from their paper, looking at humpback whale presence across the different regions, going from north to south. And then you'll see on the x axis, these are the months over given year, and the number of days per week that a given species was present in a particular reason. I'm going to use two terms when describing their seasonality, the first being year round presence, meaning that in a given region, a species was present for the entirety of a year, versus cross regional presence which means that for a time period, that species was present over a multitude of regions if not the entirety of the Western North Atlantic, shown with the humpback example here. Moving through this table, we'll start with the right whale. They had year round presence from Cape Hatteras north up to the Scotian shelf, and their cross regional presence occurred from November through April. Humpbacks were from the Gulf of Maine up to Greenland for year round presence and cross regionally they were present from November through April as well. Say whales were present year round in southern New England and cross regionally from November through February. Bin whales were present in the mid Atlantic up to the Scotian shelf and cross regionally from August to April. And blue whales were present year round in Greenland and cross regionally from November through February. I'd like to note that blue whales in general were located where protected more on recorders that were further offshore, rather than ensure recorders. In 2010, it was observed through the visual surveys that there was a change in species distribution, particularly the North Atlantic right whale. And in 2010 is when the Gulf of Maine experienced a significant amount of warming, which then changed the distribution of prey species. So Davis at all subdivided their time period to look at data collected prior to 2010 versus post 2010 and that's what's shown here in this graph again looking at the seasonality from with months on the x axis and the number of days per week of right whale being present on the y axis and then subdivided left being after 2010, right being post 2010. And for example here I'm just going to highlight that for the Scotian shelf and the Gulf of Maine regions towards the latter half of the year prior to 2010 there were they were present whereas after 2010 they were absent in those regions. So this is better summarized in this figure here which is the result of their modeling of the adjusted mean daily presence of particular species over a given region. So I'm showing here, the blue lines being the time period after 2010, and the red lines being the time period before 2010. And first off, across all species, there were fewer detections on the Scotian shelf, which is region number three, after 2010. The facts overall showed the least amount of change across all regions between the two time periods. Say whales increased in presence in all regions after 2010. Finn and blue whales exhibited a variability in their distribution and their presence pre and post 2010. The North Atlantic right whale significantly decreased its presence in the north, but increased its presence in the mid Atlantic and south. And right here that region seven in the study encompasses the area off of southern New England, which is the area that is slated for the upcoming offshore wind energy development. And in this region for humpback whales, say whales and North Atlantic right whales there was an increase in presence post 2010. So the next step for Davis and colleagues is to look at the spatial temporal variability for these Bailey and we all species from 2014 to 2024, which is obviously in progress as we're not at 2024 yet. So you can view in the meantime, the results of their analysis on our past accusation map website, where once an analysis and recorder for deployment has been completed for analysis. The data are uploaded and the websites pretty interactive in terms of you can play around with which recorders to view with time frames and species. So lastly, I'm going to go into the baselines that we're building for the offshore wind energy areas. So currently our efforts extend from the northern tip of the Gulf of Maine all the way down to the mid Atlantic. And we have recorders both inshore and further offshore. And we're going to focus the next next aspect of this talk on the recorders just south of Massachusetts in Rhode Island, been collecting data here since 2020. So overall we've got about three years of data some of our sites. There's a total of 12 sites here and we're going to be adding another four in the next couple months. And we'll be picking up the next set of recorders next month. These are bottom mounted recorders that have been recording at five month periods continuously. So the first effort is to just understand the seasonality of cetaceans in this area. So this is work spearheaded by Sophie van Paris that leads our group. Looked at all cetacean species from the lowest frequency blue whales in the area, all the way up to the highest frequency harbor purposes in this area. And we're looking at monthly presence of these species, the number of days per week these species are present in Massachusetts Rhode Island. So the first thing I'd like to draw your attention to is the North Atlantic right well presence and the harbor porpoise presence are similar in terms of the fact that they both occur mainly from October through April. Next is the ESA listed sperm well occurred in the study area from May through August and had opposite presence and with respect to the right whale and harbor porpoise. And that some species exhibited year round presence, which would be the various dolphin species, humpbacks North Atlantic right whales and say whales. And then looking a little closer. Our colleague Amanda Holdman is preparing a manuscript that looks more detailed into the spatial variability of harbor porpoise. So she's looking at our recorders in the Gulf of Maine and in southern New England. And these are using the f pods that are co located on our mornings. There's two years of data spanning November 2020 to 22. In general, she's found that the southern New England area has a more predictability of harbor porpoise presence than the Gulf of Maine. So in this figure here, these are the results of her modeling of harbor porpoise seasonality. So the blue boxes, the data in the blue boxes are belonging to Southern New England. The data in the yellow boxes are the Gulf of Maine. And off the bat. There's, you can see that the trends in the southern New England are more consistent than those up in the Gulf of Maine and MDR Mount Desert Rock is the site located in red. And that site is more significant in terms of having more harbor porpoise presence than any of the other recorders, as well as having higher foraging rates at that site than most of what is reported in the literature. And in general, she found a strong correlation with harbor porpoise presence and sea surface temperature, where harbor porpoises were only present in areas in which the waters were 16 degrees or cooler. Next is another study being led by Annabelle Westell that is looking more closely at the sperm well presence in southern New England, as I first showed with the seasonality plot from Sophie's work. And so this is looking across the three years in southern New England at the various recorders that we have. Again month is on the x axis and the percent of days present of the total days analyzed is your y axis. And we have the different sites of the southern New England as the different bars. Times when there are no recordings are shaded light gray. So, first off, in 2020 and 2021 sperm wells were present in the summer months mainly between June and August, and there was a secondary peak in late in the fall around November. However, in 2022, this, this reliability of having a summer peak is absent, and there's still the fall peak. And so that led to the question of what was different in 2021 versus 2022. So, looking at the illyx squid landings data. Here there's a figure of the amount of squid caught in southern New England, the dark blue line being the data from 2022 versus the data in 2021 being the yellow line. You can see that there are substantially fewer squid caught in 2022 relative to 2021, which suggests that there could possibly be a link here between illyx squid presence and sperm wells on the shelf in southern New England and this is something that we're going to be looking further into as part of this work. To conclude, PAM is a versatile tool that can be used for any time span, and long term studies can help to distinguish environmental change from anthropogenic anthropogenic induced change. The key here is to record in an area for long enough to be able to detect a change. For example, the North Atlantic right whale and other Baylian whales change their distribution at five years, but we don't have as long of a time series for odontists. We did see changes after three years for sperm wells, and for both Baylian whales and odontists. Again, the question being, how long do you need to record in a given area to be able to say that change belongs to a particular factor still remains to be determined. Other advances in technology do allow us to monitor these higher frequency species, so we were able to capture sperm whales with our recorders and saw that they occurred seasonally in southern New England, as well as understanding and capturing the distribution in the Gulf of Maine and in southern New England. Here's just a list of the various projects and papers that I've discussed as part of this presentation. And it takes a village and we have a really great one and just thankful for all the field teams and vessel crews and the analysts that have helped collect and analyze these data and all of the collaborators that have contributed towards all of these data analysis. Thank you, Anne-Marie. As I mentioned, I'll take one or two clarifying questions. I'll look for raised hands. And I'll just note quickly, because I didn't mention it when we got underway, but the chat feature is a wonderful tool and I encourage folks to use it for the exchange of information. But I do not monitor it typically for the purpose of integrating questions into the Q&A. So I do encourage folks to raise their hand and I will call on folks as I see them. Any clarifying questions for Anne-Marie? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, sorry Stacy, you're probably getting tired of me already. But that's something new for a lot of people on this call. Yeah, just a clarifying, Anne-Marie, well great presentation and a lot of us can appreciate the amount of effort that goes into processing all those acoustic data, so it's no small feat. Cross regional. I just, I was a little confused when you showed that for the baleen whale species and the harbor horses, you sort of lumped right whales into a seasonal category, but then you also put them into the, you know, year round presence category. Just in, maybe I missed it and I got it wrong, but how many regions does a species need to be in to be cross regional, just two? So in that slide that was for the Davis 2017 and 2017, 2020 studies. And for cross regional, it was pretty much nine or more regions. So usually, I couldn't say all regions because the furthest north and the furthest south didn't qualify so most meant nine or more. Yeah. Thanks, that was totally a clarifying thing. So we had that debate among the authors. Thank you very much. Any other questions? I'll turn now. Oh, Scott, you got it just under the wire. So that was a great, that was a great talk, very fascinating to two relatively quick clarifying questions. And then you showed a map of where your array of equipment was to do this measuring. It looked like it was, we were pretty well positioned up in the kind of the New England area but I didn't look like there, you could potentially use some more measurement measurements in the kind of the Atlantic area where a lot of the new wind development is going on. Is, is that a, is that a gap and is it something, is it an, is it a need. And then my second question is, are there any plans to do something similar on the west coast to build a baseline for instance around the the areas that were have been leased in offshore California. To answer the first question. So the map I showed was just of Northeast Fisheries Science Center recorders. There are other centers and institutions that have recorders out in the mid Atlantic. From what I recall, it's potentially less coverage than than what's in southern New England there but I'm not fully confident in that but that map was only for our recorders. And then to answer your second question. So we focus on the east coast. So it would be a question more for our West Coast colleagues, in terms of whether or not this kind of effort is being done on the West Coast. Thank you. And I see that about from hub SeaWorld has her hand up as well and she may be able to, I saw her nodding her head so I'll turn to her for a question if she has one but also she may be able to weigh in on that point. I can't weigh in on that point but I do have a question that may be relevant to the West Coast as well. Are you doing any intensive passive monitoring in the vicinity of developed wind sites like Black Island. And if so, how is that different from looking at the regional area in other words is it such that you could get at some of the behavioral reactions of the animals. Great question. We have the closest we have to the Black Island wind farm recorders are Cox's ledge sites. However, those sites were put up after the wind farm construction. There do exist some recordings from Cornell that had a line of recorders from Rhode Island. In short Rhode Island offshore to further offshore. And those data have been analyzed and were included in Davis's study, however, that was only up to 2014. Okay, so there wasn't an intensive effort that I'm aware of, but whatever reporters were out there have been analyzed for Bailey and Wales in that area. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And I see additional hands have gone up. Kevin, I'll ask you just to be real brief if you have any additional questions and Jill is yours in response to answer question or separate. Yeah, no it was we're going to talk a little bit about in my presentation about a regional PAM system that would to some degree get at the behavioral question. Excellent. Thank you. So Kevin, if you've got one more quick question, we'll take that now. Sure. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I was wondering if the reduction in in traffic and supply chain due to the COVID outbreak had any effect on those distributions you were showing because that that would be the biggest difference between those two time periods other than climate changes. Right, so we do have a project in the works in which we are looking at anthropogenic changes to the environment and how that how how that may compare to citation distributions and within Sophie's paper that she will be putting out. We've looked at the soundscape and the amount of vessel presence from 2020 up till present. And you do see in the soundscape a reduction in noise. So that was in 2021 around the time when COVID restrictions were high and then an increase in soundscape in 2022. So, at this point in time I can't say yes or no but I do know that there are the data there and we have been looking at at least vessel presence and soundscape metrics relative to the pandemic. Thank you. Thank you. At this time, I'll turn to Peter from the US re mammal commission. And I'll ask him to introduce himself. And I'll just note, I think we also have all three of our re mammal commission commissioners on the line as well. So Peter, I don't know if you want to just briefly introduce them as well. But we appreciate them joining us today also. Okay, turn it over to you. Okay, so I'm just making sure if I shared my screen yet. You have and we can see it looks great and see the presentation. Okay, thank you. And I appreciate the chance to talk to the committee on offshore science and assessment today on the subject of the recent whale strandings on the Atlantic coast, as related to offshore wind. And at the same time to talk a little bit about the implications of that for the stranding networks that are responding to these strandings. So let's see I got to click. Okay, so first, and just Stacy confirm you hear me and you see it okay. Yep. We can hear you well and we can see your slides they look great. Okay, sorry it looks funny on mine. So, okay. So first of all to introduce the Marine Mammal Commission, the Marine Mammal Commission is an independent federal agency that was created by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. And our real mission is to protect and conserve marine mammals and their environment using the best available science. And we are one of three agencies designated by the Marine Mammal Protection Act and we're the one that is to provide oversight of domestic and international policies and actions related to marine mammals and their habitat. And our structure and I am thrilled to have our three presidential appointed Marine Mammal Commissioners on the line today we have Francis Gulland who is our chair, Sue Moore, and Andy Reed, who are two newly appointed commissioners appointed just prior to the end of the last Congress. So, really pleased to have a committee of scientific advisors again described in the Marine Mammal Protection Act to provide the scientific advice to the commissioners on the recommendations that they make to the agencies and other entities. And we're also a really large agency we have 14 staff. And we're featured here we kind of when someone comes into the office we cross office like a little town in the Midwest where we cross off and say population 13 or put it added up when we get, get everyone in the office. And I wanted to talk about this humpback whale unusual mortality event, which has actually been going on six 2016 and continues today in 2023. This began stranding in unusually high numbers along the Atlantic coast in January 2016. And the National Marine Fisheries Service declared an unusual mortality event or a UME in April 2017, which included those stranded whales from 2016. So instead of the unusual mortality event or UME investigation process nymphs assembled an independent team of scientists coordinate with oh I'm blessing my thing. Sorry about that can hear me now. We can yeah thank you. Let me just. I'm not sure how to get a start video again. Sorry about that. This independent team was pulled together by the working group on marine mammal unusual mortality events to conduct necropsies and sample stranded whales review the data and determine the next steps for the investigation. We should know these are large whales routinely not all whales are able to be accessed for necropsies and of those able to be necropsied determining the cause of death is often really difficult due to the level of decomposition of the animals and accessibility and logistical issues. Partial or full necropsies were conducted on approximately half of the whale so far that have stranded as part of the UME and approximately 40% of those whales examined had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement. And I should note that even though whales may show evidence like when you first examine them of ship strike or something else, it really takes deeper analysis, follow up analysis to really figure out if that is indeed the cause of death. So it's not just like you saw the whale on the beach, you saw something and it's all fine we know exactly what happens a really difficult process. Let's see. Now I lost my cursor. So following the consistently high numbers of strandings at the outset of the UME, the number of humpback whales that have stranded is fluctuated during the last seven years, but the strandings have been consistently centered from Massachusetts to North Carolina. And the recent humpback whale stranding occurrence and numbers in New York and New Jersey have been comparable to the previous years of the unusual mortality event. And they've also been the strandings in those two states have been similar to the number of strandings in other states. And you've probably picked up that these strandings have gained a lot of attention in the media from local citizens and from non governmental organizations, concerned that there may be a link to offshore wind activities. State officials have expressed concern and assembly hearings have occurred in New Jersey in Maryland. There have been bills introduced in Congress that would require the Comptroller, Comptroller General of the Government Accountability Office to conduct studies to kind of assess the environmental review processes with regard to offshore wind. And there have been sort of specific inquiries from Congress on internal memos within the National Fisheries Service. So let's talk about this a little bit. The high resolution geophysical surveys or HRG surveys have been occurring off New England and the Mid-Atlantic coast for some time. But the various HRG devices have never been implicated or causatively associated with mysticity that is baleen whale strandings. Any minor impacts from such HRG surveys would be minimized or negated by the mitigation measures that are already required to be implemented by the protected species observers on the survey vessels. Greater potential impacts are expected from wind farm construction activities that have not yet begun than from HRG surveys. Although it has been covered or will be covered in some capacity today, the possible impacts from construction activities would be minimized with seasonal restrictions on such things as impact pile driving by effective sound attenuation measures and passive acoustic monitoring measures, and by designating appropriate mitigation zones and vessel strike avoidance measures. These humpback whale strandings have occurred at a time when the whales have been concentrating in near shore areas in an apparent response to the concentration of their menhaden prey. When foraging in near shore waters, the whales are in closer proximity to major shipping channels. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection recently indicated that changes in ocean temperature and water chemistry due to climate change caused populations of marine species, including menhaden, to move closer to shore. Thereby increasing the risk that their predators, the whales may be susceptible to vessel strike. Now, Annemarie's talk, really talked about some changing distribution, which is detected by passive acoustic monitoring. I think a general observation of the folks who really know about humpback whales such as Duke Robbins up at the Center for Coastal Studies is that they've seen humpback whales in different areas recently. Normally, or in previous years, humpbacks largely were remained to the north between the Gulf of Maine and Norway from spring through summer, and then migrated south to the tropics to Cav and mate in the winter. But recently their distribution has been wider. The observation suggests that juveniles are more commonly feeding off the mid-Atlantic states in winter when previously we would have seen most of them migrating to the Caribbean. So as distributions change, risks change. So we've talked about the whales moving closer into shipping channels, some of the busiest shipping channels in the world. And also, you have to remember that entanglement is another cause of death for large whales in the North Atlantic. And as whales change their distribution, the relative risk of entanglement in fishing gear also changes. So let me talk a little bit about how we know some of this stuff, even though we don't know everything. And first of all, rapid stranding response is important for determining the causes of marine mammal deaths. And even limitation is always being able to access animals that have been founded either onshore or offshore. The whale pictured here was found floating off of Delaware. And in order to really do a necropsy on such an animal, you have to get in touch with the Coast Guard or other state entities to assist you in towing whales to the beach. And bringing heavy equipment to the beach to help you actually move the whale around and access it for necropsy, even if a whale stranded onshore, it's not that easy a task. And necropsies are very important in both determining the cause of death, and then continuing to assess the risk to large whales. It's really important that this kind of information be reported in a tiny timely manner. And we've seen some concerns on getting that information out quickly to the public who are very concerned about such such events. That's also really necessary again to minimize risks to large whales. So continuing on in this vein. We can't take the information obtained from stranding for granted. We can't take it for granted, we're going to get that information. And the stranding network is part of a strong public private partnership that routinely deals with extremely difficult circumstances, including extensive coordination and logistics, harsh weather rough seas, massive animals. We can't cut in public concern and intense media attention. And so dealing with these circumstances requires incredible skill, both among those who can actually cut up a whale, but those who assist and do the communications with regard to stranding response. So, and then after having been called out at late hours or on the holiday or on the weekend, it's almost always on the weekend to respond to a stranding. On cold windy beaches stranding network responders in their community of volunteer assistance attempt to draw conclusions regarding the cause of death from massive often heavily decomposed carcasses. Then once they leave the beach, it takes a broader community of labs and pathologists to look beyond the physical evidence uncovered on the beach to determine whether there are any underlying diseases nutritional deficiencies or which may have contributed to the death of that particular animal. So I just want to really applaud the skill and dedication of the stranding network responders up and down the coast, often working as volunteers. If it weren't for them we wouldn't be talking about this with any level of knowledge. So in regard to one to mention, there's the working group on unusual marine mammal mortality events and they're also funding sources from from, I guess sources established under the marine mammal protection act including the grant grants which support stranding efforts, but also the unusual mortality event contingency fund, which was established in 1992 to compensate persons or entities for responding to marine mammal unusual mortality events. This is dispersed by the National Marine Fisheries Service in consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service. This contingency fund has received appropriated monies only once in the last 18 years, with approximately 800,000 deposited in 2005. Since then stranding network organizations have provided many services free of charge, and have requested reasonable consultation for others. So appropriated funds are needed for the stranding network organizations to have the resources to respond adequately to ongoing and future UMEs and to conduct the necessary investigations to determine the causes of those events and tell us how to mitigate such mortalities. The appropriation congressional appropriations are needed to ensure the solvency the fund also should note that donations can be received from the general public from non governmental organizations and from industry. And I checked and you can actually, you can provide those by debit or credit card. To conclude, I want to really draw your attention to the primary focus of folks on the East Coast with respect to large whale conservation. Similar to humpback whales. An unusual mortality event was also declared for North Atlantic right whales in 2017 impacts that species from what impacts that species are even more grave. North Atlantic right whales currently number about 340 individuals with fewer than 70 breeding females. North Atlantic right whales occupy the same waters and are equal equally vulnerable to threats of vessel strike and entanglement in fishing gear. The National Marine Fisheries Services currently reviewing comments on proposed vessel speed measures to reduce the threat of vessel strike to North Atlantic right whales. These measures which are critical to the protection of this species will also protect other large whale species on the Atlantic coast once they're finalized and we hope they will be finalized soon. And now Congress while Congress is an active measures to freeze further regulatory actions of the Atlantic large whale take reduction team until 2028. It's important that work continue on reducing the other major threat to North Atlantic right whales entanglement and vertical line fishing gear. Development of buoy lists or pop up or hopeless gear and other and work to foster its adoption, as well as other work with the industry and local communities to to ameliorate the threats to North Atlantic right whales is critical. In the meantime we just heard about passive acoustic monitoring anything we can do to advance our methods to detect right whales in near real time is needed to support adaptive risk reduction, and to document the co occurrence of right whales with the threats to the survival of their species. So that all ends my little talk and welcome any questions. Thank you. I'm going to stop share. There we go. Thank you Peter. I'll look for raise hand for any questions. Kevin. Yeah, thank you Peter is very interesting. I noticed in your in your histogram on on the on the humpbacks that the, you know the really significant that the higher years seem to be from 2016 to 2020. Do you think that the unusual mortality event is continuing, and that the reduction in 2021 was was again just a result of the covert and less traffic, or do you think that the reduction in 2021 did it somewhat return to normal rate of strandings. That's a great question I'm going to have to leave that to the me working group on unusual mortality events. I think the real sort of take home for this talk is that the larger numbers were earlier in the UMA but it definitely is continuing. So we're really interested in that vessel traffic stuff as, as we know we've had a, you know, a constraint on vessels but we've also had a massive increase in vessels since the since coven as people try to resolve the supply chain problems. Thank you very much. You bet. Less. Yeah. Thanks, Peter. I know this is a reach but in trying to anticipate the possible effects and particularly indirect effects between wind fields once they're up and Wales particularly right Wales. So are you looking mainly at potential changes in ship traffic and fishing patterns or other other things to consider as well. I think that's a great question I mentioned, you know that the construction activities themselves are the ones that have slightly greater potential to impact Wales but those are being addressed through mitigation measures. So we need to reduce that impact to establish mitigation zones around individual construction sites. At the same time, the, you know, the increase in support support vessels to wind energy projects is, you know, the sort of almost a more predictable threat to large Wales, we need to manage the threat of vessel strike to Wales. As for, as for fishing vessels just one comment I don't actually know the answer to that question but fishing vessels in terms of vessel strike risk are operating at lower speeds than some of the larger commercial vessel so for instance off of Cape Cod and still wagon bank, the compliance of fishing vessels with voluntary speed measures is really great because they don't just don't go so fast. In terms of commercial vessels yes the increase of commercial shipping is going to continue to be a major problem for large Wales if we don't manage vessel speed in the habitat of large Wales. Yeah, the other concern I had was just a shift in the distribution of hot fishing if there's a lag and getting ropeless gear into play. And that goes back to the environmental changes and do, do fishing activities change, both with respect to commercial development offshore, and with respect to environmental changes. I'll call on, I'm calling on people so I'll call on Chris that way. That's fine I'll take a break. Go ahead Scott. Scott sorry. Right. Great talk Peter very, very, very helpful. Two questions. It looked like 2017 was a bad year both for humpbacks and for right whales. Do you see. What, what, what linkage do you see, or if any, you know, both of them, having increased UMEs in that general timeframe that's my first question. And my second one is, are there less any lessons learned from our European colleagues about correlations potential correlations between the activity offshore wind activities they're further along of course than we are. And they've gotten a lot more activity in the construction phase, any lessons learned there that you think we need to be giving consideration to. I am going to let some of the speakers following the answer both of these questions more effectively than I can, because both john here and Jill, I think can speak to those and both the UME and the, the European experience but on the right UME in 2017, the, the movement of right whales up to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and major ship strike and entanglement events up there. I think really fed into that as a unique, the unique change in right whale distribution with respect to humpbacks I'm not sure that there was any sort of corresponding similar, similar almost like state change and where they were so I, those are connected. And my simple answer with respect to European colleagues is that the distribution of large whales around European wind farm is just very different I mean it's been mostly focused on harbor purposes, and smaller dissertations that are in that in that region with very fewer fewer large whales to be encountered or concerned about but like I said I'd let Jill or others really answer that effectively. Thank you very much. Any last questions before we let Peter off the hook. Well, Peter, thank you so much appreciate your time. We will move on to the next session now. And for that, I believe we've got a little bit of a change in the agenda. I think we will be hearing first from john and then from Joe they're listed in the opposite order on the agenda. But I see john and turn his camera on do I have that right john that you're planning to go first. Yes, correct Stacy. Well, I'll turn it over to you just a reminder to please introduce yourself and then we'll turn it to Jill after your presentation and maybe a few clarifying questions. Great, thank you very much. I'm going to share a presentation with all you but my name is john hair I work for Noah fisheries. And I work out of the Northeast fisheries science center in Woods Hole. I'm going to talk a little bit just give an overview of, you know, our responsibilities under endangered species act. And you've muted yourself. Can you hear me now. We can hear you well again. Thank you so much. And you can see my, my slides. Yep, we can see them. So, you know, as we know the North Atlantic right whale. It's an endangered species. And the species has been in decline since approximately 2010. As of the last official stock assessment report in 2019 that number in the upper right. There are approximately 368 right whales left. But this number is caveated asterisked by, you know, information from the 2021 stock assessment indicates that there are fewer than 350 individuals left and the stock assessment report that official number will be updated. At some point during the year. And this decline is, you know, both the number of deaths have increased. And that bar chart on the bottom shows the number of calves born annually so there's also been a reduction in the number of calves born so it's a it's a dire situation for the North Atlantic right whale. Thinking about the authorities for Noah fisheries. We, with regards to North Atlantic right whales we're working under two authorities. One is the endangered species act. And the purpose of this act is to prevent the extinction of endangered species, and to conserve the ecosystems upon which they depend, and then relative to wind energy development. And this is section seven jeopardy standard, which is designed to ensure that federal actions be they fisheries management plans or offshore wind authorizations do not have significant negative impacts on the survival and recovery of the species, or designated critical habitat. And then we also are working under the marine mammal protection act with North Atlantic right whales. And the purpose of this act is to prevent marine mammals from declining beyond the point where they cease to be a significant functioning element of the ecosystems of which they are part. Some elements of this act which are relevant. One is the potential biological removal approach, whereby the level of human cause mortality of marine mammal population can sustain will still allowing them to recover for North Atlantic right whales that population biological removal threshold is less than one individual can be, you know, death can be caused by human cause mortality to allow them to recover. In terms of the the other standard which we have is the marine mammal protection act incidental take authorization. This authorizes taking taking here is you know defined as a term of art. It allows specific activities that have a negligible impact on all affected marine mammal species and stocks and authorized taking as a small amount relative to the population there's different levels of take. And then what we're really talking here is take defined as behavioral interactions or harassment. So in North Fisheries we have a, you know, a large number of our activities across the East Coast are related to our North Atlantic right whale efforts. Our goal is to halt the current population decline and recover the species. We have activities in the Northeast of the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office and the Northeast Fisheries Science Center direct science center where I am the director. We have activities in our Southeast Southeast Regional Fisheries Office and Southeast Fisheries Science Center. And then we have activities at three of our headquarters offices the office of protected resources the office of science and technology and the office of law enforcement so we work across these offices across the geography of North Atlantic right whale with a goal to halt the current population decline and to recover the species. We recently put out what we call the road to recovery, which has these sort of six elements to recovering North Atlantic right whale. I have a link to this and the presentation which I hope can be shared with you afterwards but just to kind of walk through each of these six areas one is vessel strikes. As Peter mentioned that we are currently, you know, reviewing public comment on a new vessel speed rule to reduce the probability of vessel strikes. We also have an emphasis on fishing gear entanglements. And earlier in the day you heard about the Atlantic large whale take reduction team. And that team is tasked with coming up with proposals to reduce entanglements and fishing gear. And you also heard that some of their activities have been put on hold for six years to well this idea of on demand sort of technology has time to develop. We also work to identify potential and emerging threats, and we're working in partnership with Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to consider how to have offshore wind energy development well also still recovering and protecting North Atlantic right whales and you'll hear more about that from Jill. After this talk on the monitoring progress side. We have our monitoring population and health we have an extensive monitoring network you heard some of some of that this morning from Anna Marie regarding the past of acoustic monitoring we also have our base monitoring aircraft monitoring near real time mooring and glider monitoring and are working to bring other technologies to the fore as quickly as we can. We also continue to evaluate the threats to North Atlantic right whales, and also work to understand the effectiveness of our conservation activities. And these are done largely through a northeast implementation team and a southeast implementation team and those two teams work to sort of measure how our activities are being effective. In terms of the current strandings which you've heard about during winter 2022 and 2023. From December one to the present today. There's been an increase in the frequency of large whale deaths along the East Coast, with a majority of these whale deaths in the mid Atlantic. We've had 28 reported mortalities of large whales, three sperm whales, 20 humpback whales, two right whales, one say well and three Mickey whales. And our stranding network partners conducted full net crops is on 16 of these animals and collected basic biological data on six more. And I just want to, you know, Peter talked about the, the thanks that goes out to these groups for doing this work it is hard. You know, and sometimes they're doing it volunteers are doing it and so just a lot of credit goes to them for for engaging in this type of work so we understand what happens to these animals. Of the 16 that have been neck crops seen vessel strike was the likely cause of death and at least nine. And we are awaiting the histology reports to confirm and perhaps provide insights and greater insights into the death of these nine and also insights into the deaths of the others. And this you know this finding really working from a place of evidence this really sort of gives us reason to put our vessel speed rule into effect because we are seeing vessel strikes as a as an important cause of death in these strandings. As Peter also mentioned, you know, both the mortalities of humpback whales and the mortalities of North Atlantic right whales are linked as part of these unusual mortality events. The humpback whale mortality numbers were increasing in 2016 the UME was declared and it continues into 2023. Similarly, the North Atlantic right whale stranding numbers were increasing in 2017. And an unusual mortality event was declared and is still ongoing. And there's more information on both of these unusual mortality events on our web pages noted at the bottom. And this also Peter showed. This is from the web page of the humpback UME. And you can see that increase in 2016. UME is declared and it's still continuing. And then that the bar in 2023. That stands at 14 strandings thus far. It's a partial year. And just then also another point is that you know the number of actual deaths likely exceeds the number of strandings strandings are just the deaths that we observe so this what we are seeing in 2023 as part of this larger UME in humpback whales and in right whales. In terms of what we're doing with regards to offshore wind development activities. Just to be clear, no fisheries is not authorized or proposed to authorize mortality or serious injury of whales for any wind related action. Erica went through the process for determining whether activities are going to impact whales and nothing that would cause mortality or serious injury has been authorized. And similarly offshore wind developers haven't applied for nor has no fisheries approved authorization to kill any marine mammals incidental to any offshore wind site characterization survey or construction activities. And we do have a full list of active and in process into incidental take authorizations, including those related to offshore wind available on our website link there when the presentation share will take you to that list. There are 13 active incidental harassment authorizing level be harassment which is a behavioral harassment only of marine mammals incidental to the offshore wind site characterization surveys in the Atlantic Ocean from southern New England to the Carolinas And sort of thinking, you know, longer term, we have been working closely with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to develop a draft offshore wind North Atlantic right whale strategy. And in this strategy, you know, we lay out the vision that both agencies share a common vision to protect and promote the recovery of North Atlantic right whales. And this is where, you know, I'll stop my presentation, happy to take a few questions and then turn it over to Jill to go into more details about the strategy. So I believe I'm no longer sharing my screen so that's right you've you've turned it off I see Doug has raised his hand so we'll take his question first and I'll give others a moment or so to raise their hands if they have any clarifying questions also don't go right ahead. Yeah, super thanks just one quick one john just to be clear 13 active I ha's, all of which authorized only level B takes there no level a takes authorized in any of the I ha's the current currently active I ha's or those under consideration. Correct. That's my understanding. Okay, and those are 13 active I ha's for activities related to offshore wind survey activities correct. Right. Okay, thanks john. Yeah, you're welcome. Michael. Yeah, john and back to Peter to really the key of this conversation has largely been the data generated on the beach through various necropsy activities. It's struck me that the fisheries observer program for the impact of fisheries on small cetaceans and pinnipeds is fully funded, whereas the word volunteer keeps on coming up when it comes to these necropsies, and I think, as this whole debate evolves, the need for, you know, professional fully funded large whale in particular necropsies, because essentially these large whales events are being providing the same data quality, they should, at least, as the observer program, in fact, more so in some ways. So it's just it's always been a mismatch to me that the agency is looking to substantial not for profit contributions, and, and their volunteers in these diagnostic efforts. Thank you for pointing it out, you know, the those programs are funded very differently within no fisheries. And that could be a useful recommendation for this committee to make for us to sort of think about how we do that. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. And thank you, John, for that response. I will just take a quick moment to note on the record that this committee does not offer recommendations, John, for bone more otherwise. Sorry, my mistake. That's okay. I just, I gotta, I gotta make sure I'm clear with a with a hundred twenty two folks on the line want to make sure we're clear that this committee. The individuals on it provide their individual input and feedback as opposed to any formal consensus input on behalf of the national academies. However, certainly the national academies. Those convene consensus committees for ad hoc cast, and those committees can make formal recommendations. The agency. I'd like to rephrase my previous answer saying thank you very much Michael for the comment I will be sure to sort of discuss that within no fisheries. And John, don't don't worry, we're not quiet individually. I know. I'll turn to Scott next. Hey, John, great talk. Thanks for sharing that information was was your group or no fisheries consulted about potential incidental takes with respect to any of the construction projects in state waters I'm thinking about particularly block Island wind development I guess which is the most mature offshore construction project on the Atlantic. I need to check for you on that and I don't want to, to make a supposition so I will confirm and get back to the committee on that. Any additional questions for John before we move on to Jill's presentation. Is there a hand up from the friar comment or is that a new hand. We'll turn then to Jill, and they'll please, I think, many people on the line know you but please do introduce yourself. I'm Jill Lewandowski, I work for bone and I direct our division of environmental assessment which looks at how we are assessing impacts or sort of pulling the, the science together with the policy, and I also direct our center for marine acoustics. I also serve in a working group between bone and Noah that is working to develop a North Atlantic right well and offshore wind strategy. So I'm going to start by talking a little bit about the intersect of right wheels in offshore wind. Go into a bit about what bone is specifically doing or doing with its partners and then go into a greater detail about the right well strategy itself which again is is being developed between bone and Noah. And then there I always want to say, you know that this is all obviously meaning very focused on science and so yay that's great. But I also want to recognize that that I know the concern out there in the public about impacts of whales is is strong and genuine and understandable I mean, these are beloved creatures that they're aesthetically important for for many people they are a sign of what is happening in our, in our, you know, ecosystems and in our environment. And I also point out for like tribes along with historical connections along the coast. They're very, very important to culture history. And in some cases, these are actually ancestors of some of some of these tribes so there's an actual component to this that goes way beyond the science and until the real impact that this has on many people. So, moving on, if I guess I'm getting a slow I might have to advance it. Maybe moving on there we go. I guess it's just the the roller in my mouse that works. So, talking just very briefly here. So looking at the annualized right well representation so basically it's all of course all the data over the course of a period of time that's, you know, gives you a sense of where you tend to have more high density spots. You can also see here we have like on the top here along the Gulf of Maine is the call area. This right, sorry this right now is a call area, it's not actually a lease area. It's a little further down here along the Nantucket shoals which is in this area. We have leases as well as in the New York bite area. And you can see over here on the right there's some protect leases and perspective wind energy areas as you go along the coast. So this is just to give sort of a snapshot of where activity is looking to be developed. Of course in the inset there you can see where the North Atlantic right well critical habitat areas are. But as we know the whales do move a bit we do know there's some year round presence in some areas where we're finding out a lot more what we thought we knew through like year 2010. We're finding from 2010 on that things are shifting and they're shifting faster, but you know there are times of the year where you're going to see whales and greater numbers right whales and greater numbers in in some areas versus others. It's also a busy environment out there so this gives you a little idea of some of the least areas here you can see it looks like you know one of those saws. And this is in the kind of New York bite area and you can see some other lease areas further offshore. But you can also see the shipping lanes and the traffic lanes so this is, you know, a 12 month look so pulling in all of those vessel track lines coming into New York Harbor, over a 12 month time period so obviously it's a very busy area out there as far as the ship's movement and you know this is part of one of the things I know that no is attempting to address with the the vessel speed rule. I would go so far to say that it's you know when you look at how much activity is out there. And if whales are coming more into these areas then it's unfortunate but not surprising we might be seeing more vessel strikes. And then specifically though to these offshore wind site characterization surveys, we heard this morning from Erica about the acoustic acoustic sort of around that and what the potential for that impact could be. When the site characterization surveys are moving and actually collecting data, they're moving at very, very slow paces. It's a transit from port to the location at faster speeds. But we do have a reporting requirement, if there is a near miss, certainly a hit, even if you see a dead animal, you have to report it immediately and we have not had any reports come in of any right whales or large whales being struck or hit by vessels and of course that is a reporting that's done from the protective species observers that are independent observers that are out there, but certainly if something were to have happened along that lines and it's found out it wasn't reported. That is a tremendous compliance issue with a lot of repercussions so we are feeling confident that you know we're not in a situation where the vessels associated with the site characterization surveys are responsible for any of these strikes. So speaking now going into a little bit, there's a long history of bone and its partners, certainly working doing right whale research along the Atlantic coast. Back in the 80s, there was interest in potential oil and gas and that resurfaced a number of years ago, although nothing came of that. But you know over that 20 year period there's a lot of different projects going on that went on that have collected a lot of information that it has sped into larger you know meta analysis that are being done. And this is a glimpse of some examples of those studies and you can get to any of their of the reports through our website as well. On going right now we are also leaning in quite a bit to to doing more to try to understand more about right whale ecology, behavior distribution abundance, how we might be able to mitigate impacts as they potentially may come along particularly as you get into that situation and operation phase. So it ranges anywhere from a really getting, you know, better approaches out there to look at population level effects by our energetic models, looking at these persistency and aggregations of right whales. Looking at the gaps in acoustic ecology so right whales are a little bit more challenging to be able to sort of detect on like passive acoustic monitoring but if we can understand a little bit more about their q rates and and how they use the environment acoustically, we may be able to pull information out of data that we have not necessarily been able to. We are looking at satellite imagery to see if there's a way to do automatic detection of right whales and other species. We are looking at developing auditory waiting functions for low frequency whale so that's a right whale like many of the bailing whales they hear and very very low frequencies. And it's really difficult to do a hearing test on a whale in order to understand, you know what are the frequencies that they hear the most. So like as humans we hear in certain frequencies where other species, even our dogs may hear in different frequencies. So getting a better understanding of what that is for whales is really helpful. We also have this expert relativistic risk assessment framework. We have obviously leaned into the potential consequences of disturbance modeling that's been going on for a number of years but of course that requires you to have a lot of data on a lot of species in order to to run those models fully. And so we worked on something that could give us just a relatively risk looking at various important factors and get helping us sort of drive decisions about what may be the best thing to drive mitigations. For example, most recently we did an assessment of two projects in the vicinity and we looked at right whales and a few other species. And you know what happens with both are constructing but if one is constructing what if one is an operation why one is constructing. There's a lot of good information about there about relative risk across those different scenarios, and we're going to continue to develop that framework, bring it up into more chronic looking at cumulative cumulative from a sense of various noise, producing activities, and then also we could ideally love to pull that up into a true cumulative risk assessment framework where we could consider other non noise stressors. We also have a lot going on right now trying to really tune in and improve upon what are we going to require during construction and operation. So the mitigation of monitoring measures, the right well strategy itself and appendix be does outline a lot of them. And so we will continue to build those require those adjust them as more information becomes available. So we do for the cops those construction and operation plans we did develop some modeling guidelines from the Center for acoustics. So that we have consistency and how each of the operators are actually evaluating the modeling and the acoustic impacts. We're coming out now with sound field verification guidelines which are essentially going to be along the lines of measurements at every pile being driven. It likely changes if it's a if it's a pile that is consistent in water depth size, compared to something that's already been really fully evaluated. Then it's a little lighter form of sound field verification which is actually measuring in the field. And if it's something that's a little bit newer, it'll be more intense. We're also looking at building a regional monitoring a Pam monitoring system up in the Northeast, and this, the way we are trying to design this would be at would be aimed at trying to determine just the presence of wind farms of change the behavior, where you know showing up moving, we want it to be able to detect that and it's a huge undertaking that's going to be have a lot of different partners with it, working closely with like the RWSC and other entities. We're right now doing a power analysis to really get a good sense of how many of these sensors will need to have out there in order to answer the questions that we're going to be looking at. And we also would I are working towards how can we pull all that data into one place make it publicly available and even create some tools where anybody could run reports, you know, kind of those basic reports that that people are interested in where we can create it so so anybody can go into that and be able to get the information that they would like. We want to expand upon real time tools so we know passive acoustic monitoring can can help detect. That's a little, we're not quite there with locating. So how can we lean into that and get better technology that I can actually not just detect but locate where I write while bright whale call is coming from. We also want to do more predictive tools. One example is dimethyl sulfide so trying to use as the zoo plankton are are, you know, chomping on the phytoplankton and there are certain things that you know certain dimethyl sulfide is released there's maybe way through satellite imagery to detect that and use it as a way to predict the likelihood that animals are going to be coming to that area to also feed and satellite imagery, just, you know, separately how that can detect. We're looking at auditory recovery time for impulsive sounds obviously pile driving is one area that we want to really focus on on. One thing that I that I skipped over accidentally was that received sound level limit we are looking to establish basically a limit. We don't want to overly prescribe it it's sort of performance based. And right now we're looking and it still needs to be finalized but we're looking like at a you know within a kilometer of each. If each of those piles, the sound cannot pass that point cannot exceed what would be considered level a harassment for any bailing well, and level a means potential injury to hearing. So by establishing that and setting the bar and letting industry develop the technology for how they're going to get there. We can protect what we're we're most concerned about when it comes to to the pile driving, and I would be remiss if I don't it didn't point out that Department of Energy has been a huge partner on that. And then there have been a lot of workshops that have gone on already, not just from bone Noah as well. Many, some of you on the phone have been part of these workshops. In the interest of time I'm going to just go ahead and proceed on but the point is there's been a lot of work done, but we still do have information gaps that we actively trying to understand and fill. And so that brings us to the strategy. We released a draft of the strategy back in October of 2022. And the vision of that is to protect and promote the recovery of North Atlantic right whales while responsibly developing offshore wind. And what it is at this point is that it's a path forward between bone and Noah on how we're going to do that. And note this will be it will be finalized and I'll talk about timing on that shortly. But it's a living document so as new information becomes available. We can update this we can adjust if there's a need to reprioritize the science needs based off new information we can do that as well. But this gives you a general sense of at least of the draft, how we sorted into table of contents, you know describing the issue a bit. I'll go a little bit more into detail on the framework and the three goals, but also talking about partners and potential financial sources resources. And of course I mentioned earlier this appendix B which has the avoidance and minimization measures. So, looking at the first one the first goal mitigation and decision support so each of the goals for the most part has a couple sub goals. So the first one is just refining our mitigation and monitoring measures so they can be as effective as possible both at a project level and at a multiple or cumulative level. We're reviewing and updating measures regularly, making sure they're complimentary across statutory reviews. These measures come up in NEPA they come up under the Remail Protection Act they come up under the Danger Species Act. And we need to make sure that they're complimentary across those reviews tracking mitigation technologies ways that we can better mitigate, and we do look internationally to see what examples we can gain and there are some. That have existed so far where where offshore wind has developed. They haven't necessarily had a bailing whale issue it's been more harbor porpoise issues. So it's a little bit of a different problem that they were seeking to solve. And then supporting research to, to, you know, develop those technologies as well as better detection technologies. So the second one here is prioritizing quieting, whether it's through the foundations, whether it's these performance standards like I just spoke to for impact pile driving, or whether it's for ways to promote quieting technologies and vessels. We also under this goal want to develop and improve upon risk and decision support tools. We have things like population viability analysis models, cumulative effects modeling. I spoke before about the expert relativistic framework risk framework, trying to build that out even further. So looking along other sort of modeling to look at what measures might be needed for vessel strike beyond. We know it's in the 2022 know a proposed vessel speed restriction rule. We're still waiting though to find out what's going to be in any final rule, and then do we have a gap there that we still need to fill. We're looking at evaluating entanglement risk so it could be from from cables or floating wind technology. But we also want to be sure that the presence of these vessels does not necessarily move. The presence of these structures the wind facilities don't necessarily move whales into other areas where they may have higher pressures for entanglement and vessel strike concerns. So one is research and monitoring. First is we need to develop, you know, a plan. We have ideas about what that'll be but we want to make sure that plan includes things to update the baseline. As more information becomes available regularly reevaluate those priority questions, perform a gap analysis, no question, we're going to need more money in order to do all of this and we're going to do that a lot through partnerships. So, you know, there, we need to understand where we have a gap between what needs to be done and what resources we have available. This next one is essentially trying to look at ecosystem services or ecosystem based management of areas so this is a project that is in the Gulf of Maine. And he is very familiar with that one he could speak to it in much more in much more detail, looking at what is our best available science standards, as we have moved forward evaluating really disseminating the results to, you know, very adaptive management approach and working with the RWSC and other federal and state partners. So, you know, we're just out there the federal government collecting data and information the states are also doing quite a bit and other organizations so we want to make sure that we're folding that into this process. The second goal here under research and monitoring is just to support, you know, have sufficient statistical power to detect changes. So that's sort of endemic to a lot of everything that we have I talked about that long term Pam network, but we want to make sure that we've got the right network setup that can detect the changes that we would be looking for. And that is the use of other kind of data on man system satellite data emerging technologies safer longer duration satellite tags coordinating with our Canadian counterparts. Again, more habitat models, looking at stress, you know, health and stress indicators, and even leaning more into how artificial intelligence or automated processes could could help get us in the right amount of system potentially a faster and even real time. One thing to point out we are keenly aware of a potential for turbines we know turbines can change the local hydrodynamics of an area. What we don't know is if that has any impact to pre fields. And so we have at this point through the National Academies we have a contractor task order, I think it's called that's out where the National Academies is going to take a closer look at that and provide us with some recommendations. Really specifically honing in on the availability and North Atlantic right well pray and seeing if we if there's an issue there that we need to to be responsive to and protective of. And the third goals collaboration. We are going to do an implementation group we're still trying to figure out exactly what that will look like. You know, I'm sure we'll continue our bone Noah one but we're certainly going to have to expand if we want to see this strategy actually be realized develop outreach and communication. So that we can keep people that are and stakeholders that are interested regularly updated, such as web pages and other sort of fact sheets, making sure we're also coordinating and integrating this strategy into things like john mentioned like the road to recovery. And I just point out at the bottom here, the expansion of partnerships is absolutely critical. And through this we also must ensure that we do. We work with our with the sovereign tribes and have effective and meaningful government to government engagement. So last two slides. The, the draft was released in October 45 day public comment period, we had 550 individual commenters of which 270 were unique comments and about 60 or 70 of them are things that we thought might require changes. Since the comments received we also did go back into all the projects. And we pulled out all the tribal input into the various projects that have been commented on and pulled out the material in there related to to right wells and folded it into these comments. So right now we're reviewing the comments we're aiming for finalization in June of 2023. There's a bit more work for us to be done but that's our goal. And again it's a living document that will be updated as new information becomes available. And just sending here again with the goal here is that we want to promote and protect the recovery and North Atlantic right whales, while responsibly developing offshore when we recognize there are stressors out there. Many of them for these whales and how can we build a different energy future with, you know, while we're still protecting and promoting these animals it's a vision that both Noah and bone are taking extremely seriously. And that is my last slide so I will stop sharing. I can't hear Stacy I don't know if anybody else can. Okay, that's my fault. I'm sorry Jill. Thank you so much. And it is 302 so I just want to be sensitive to the agenda I do want to provide the opportunity for maybe one or two clarifying comments and I'll just note that we're spotted to take a break at three o'clock and when we return at 315. We'll have the opportunity for our panelists to bring up any sort of response or thoughts that they have initially and then we'll pose a couple of specific questions to each of them as well. But after that there will be more opportunity for discussion and so I do want to just see if there's any immediate questions for Jill or for john otherwise will move quickly towards our break and then return for the panel. Mike I see your hands up go ahead. I had a couple of questions for Jill but I'll just ask the one that's burning on me. And that is, she mentioned the need for longer term tracking tags in right wells I believe. And my question is, what data type. Are you expecting to get that you cannot get with non invasive tracking techniques such as Pam and aerial survey and so on. I mean, I understand you can find new habitats, we're talking about a known habitat here. Yeah, so I would probably lean on others in my organization that are not here but I guess what I might say is. It is but I think having a bigger picture of what these animals are doing how they're moving, even if it's outside of the areas that we're looking at for wind development are certainly going to be informative. I also think Pam, we know that, you know right wells are not as vocal or not as detected as often as perhaps other whale species. And so where there are, you know we're looking at the key rates and looking at other things as well but will longer term tags also be able to help us sort of correlate some of that data. And better how they are using their environment so I think that would be the short answer but I know there are others in my organization that could probably give a much more detailed answer than I can. I agree with all of that but you need to balance that gain versus the cost of tagging a skinny scrawny poorly growing speeches 100% 100% agree on that. Yes. Has has there been a decision to proceed. Oh, has there been a decision to do that no. No. And of course any of those kinds of things any of the research as I think as you probably well know. That would include that it requires authorization under the Endangered Species Act and marine mammal protection act as well. So, I don't know if we went when there are existing tagging programs in place I mean that not the bone is directly funny but I know we do look at stuff that the Navy is doing, you know as well. Where we're animals, you know, I think we're like we can leverage other organizations that already have permits to do some of this as well. I think is the point I was trying to get at rather than, you know, perhaps a concern about a bunch of new effort on an already critically endangered species. Good point. I'll give you a quick question and then we'll go ahead and take a break we might start our panel discussion a few minutes late just to ensure the opportunity of a sufficient break for folks but go ahead Doug. Yeah, well I'm just going to follow up on that point and see if it warranted more more discussion in the panel this this issue of right well tagging. I don't know I don't know exactly what's on your on your agenda for it or where your questions are but it certainly warrants attention. I think it could certainly relate to some of the questions that we've got for the panel. So, we'll give folks a few minutes to think about that. I'm going to give everybody a sufficient break. So, let's go ahead. It's 306 now. Let's return at 320 and we'll continue with the panel discussion and Q&A and just so our panelists are all on the same page. I'm going to speak to a few minutes to share any remarks you might have or any reactions to the things you've heard today and then we'll focus on the three questions that I think I provided everybody based on what are the additional data and information that can be integrated additional questions and then thoughts about communications as it relates to this science. So, good folks until 320 and we'll see everybody then. And again, what I will do for the purposes of moderating this discussion is I will ask. I'll call on each of our panelists in order and ask them to introduce themselves and then to provide any sort of initial remarks that they would like to thoughts based on the discussions they've heard today. Other reactions, things they think are important to mention. And then once we've gone through everybody providing their introduction and initial remarks. I'll pose one question at a time and give the panelists each an opportunity to weigh in on those questions that they have any. And then we will open it for discussion. And any Q&A that the audience would like to have as well. So, just to start us off, since it is now 320. I'm going to turn first to Ann Bowls from Hubsi World Research Institute allow her to introduce herself and share any thoughts that she might have at this time. Hey, my name is Ann Bowls. I'm a senior research scientist at Hubsi World Research Institute. And I've been working on issues related to animal behavior in the presence of human disturbance mostly noise for way too long. I wanted first to say how happy I am to see the level of investment in getting the right kinds of details and all of this stuff for the wind for offshore wind I have worked in other areas and there isn't anything like this investment, even though the potential effects are a lot higher than anything that you guys are anticipating. So, you know, kudos for managing this whole discussion very well. The second thing is I'd like to say that a lot of my comments for the rest of this discussion are going to be focused on trying to get information on what the animals are actually doing in the immediate vicinity of wind placements of one kind or another. We're particularly interested in floating wind out here and there's a lot less information about that than there is about the harder structures. But even there we don't know a lot about how animals actually interact with the placement itself so that seems like an important kind of information to get. Thank you very much and appreciate that we'll turn next to Francine Kershaw. Thank you hi everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Francine Kershaw I'm a senior scientist with a natural resources defense counselor, affectionately known as NRDC. There's a little bit of background about NRDC in the hat I'm wearing. So we view offshore wind development as critical to meeting our national climate goals promises healthier air creates thousands of well paying clean energy jobs so our organization feels really strongly that we need offshore wind and we need to move it forward as rapidly as possible. Like any ocean industry offshore wind poses risks to the environment you know has been discussed today and because we're also in a biodiversity crisis, it's important to launch this new industry in a smart way that protects our valuable and vulnerable ocean wildlife including the Atlantic right wells that across other species as well and our organization believes that we can and we also must achieve both of those goals. So that's the perspective that I'm coming to this conversation with. And for my part I've worked on this issue about the last five years, also focused on developing guidance and standards so that offshore wind can be developed rapidly and also in a responsible way that avoids and minimizes harm to marine life and habitats. And I serve as a plated member of the New York State Energy Research and develop authority on NYSERDA and their environmental technical weapons with offshore wind. And I guess I only have one overarching comment and I'm excited to get into the we did the discussion but I just have been really encouraged by the conversation today and as someone that works on on this issue on the day to day basis I ever really appreciated hearing the views of and questions of the also it's really helpful for me to be able to join you and listen into this discussion and get your perspectives as well that's been very helpful. And it's also clear that that ball in the know I really want to get get this right and actively investing in and advancing real both science and to support their policy and management work. And just, just as we get into the acoustic part of this. It's also clear to our organization that science does not support any link between the acoustic activities associated with offshore wind survey activities and the recent well stranding and I look forward to the discussion of how we can share these facts more broadly, and in a way that is trusted and really taken up by the public as part of the discussion because that's, that's something our organization has been, you know, hearing this on and we're considering, you know, that challenge on a daily basis I'm really interested in hearing, you know, those other thoughts on that. Thank you. Next, I'll turn to Michael Moore. Hello. So what's all oceanographic biology department veterinary scientists spent a lot of time pulling dead right wells apart and help backs to appreciate what everybody does these days I've sort of moved back from that now and spend more time. Looking at live right whales with photogrammetry and health assessment in mind. And that really brings me to my comment that this discussion has largely focused on the mortality event related to humpbacks and offshore wind development and prospecting and so on. It's still very important, but we also need to look at the sub lethal impacts of noise and vessel trauma and, and especially the whole question of what that joint document looked at with regards to the impact of wind production on the concerns about surface waters productivity and pray for right wells and other species. And I was interested to hear the acknowledgement with regards to the hydrographic impacts of the pylons. Well I didn't hear which is in that joint document. The question of where the extraction of the energy into the grid impacts the surface, the air surface seawater interface in terms of productivity. I'm going to get out for now. And so, you know, if you've taken energy out of the ocean, what's that doing to the pray base and that's something that I don't think has necessarily become a critical question but I have solar on my house my attic is now cooler. And I worry about that. Michael, and then I'll turn to Doug and no attack as well. Yeah, thanks Stacy and thanks to the National Academy for for the invitation and the opportunity to to participate so and and certainly for convening COSA you and bone that's a great venture together so for me by way of background I'm Duke University in the Nicholas school the environment, specifically at the Duke Marine lab and then also have an appointment in the engineering school and electrical and computer engineering to to work on and develop technology for for marine conservation research. So and then, and certainly germane to this is, I'm lucky to be the lead of a big offshore wind program through the Department of Energy and bone wildlife and offshore wind we're looking at marine mammals, as well as birds and bats. So I've personally learned a lot about seabirds and bats, and there are more bats offshore that you might realize but but nonetheless, it's been a, we're lucky enough to be in a good position to be working on this issue with quite a wonderful team several several of the co ps are on this on this call. So hopefully we can become a force multiplier for for this community which I will also say has been refreshing to work in the offshore wind community there's there's a lot of folks are very forthcoming with with thoughts and ideas and potential for data sharing so I think there's a lot of good will there and a lot of positivity that's that that we can carry forward. As far as overarching issues, I think quieting as Jill pointed out and several points and I'm not sure that that everyone would appreciate how just how hard that a lot of us have been pushing on this issue for a long time, not so much how do you have time and activity just so that you have the least amount of level b takes but how do you actually make things quieter, which then by virtue has has the bird, you know, it's quieter in the ocean you also potentially impact fewer animals so so the push from bone to actually work on quieting the actual activities, I think is a good is a good step forward, very good step forward. On an additional questions, I think. Yeah, Michael Michael hit on and I think we need to understand these oceanographic things and and I think actually interestingly the turbulence around the pilings may be acting in the other direction of from the from the surface wind mixing so it's going to be a really interesting ride to find out what what what we know about that what we can what more we can learn about it so I'll leave it there and say thanks again for the invitation. Yeah, thank you each. So, as I mentioned we've drafted a few questions it sounds like some of you sort of lightly touched on them but I'll open them to first our panelists and then also to those on the line. But, you know, again just reiterating Kosas role is largely to provide informal individual input into the science and assessment programs at Boma and that really leads us to thinking about what, you know, what additional scientific information should the agency be collecting or analyzing and prioritizing So I want to first open that question up again to our panelists and and then also to others on the line. The other questions that we had posed, you know, in a similar vein. Are there additional scientific questions that need that should be asked or need further study and also how can the federal agencies, both in particular, better communicate their science as well. So the few questions that that we've posed and again I'll open that first one up to our panelists. Is there more scientific information that the agencies could be or should be collecting and analyzing. And thank you to those that have already sort of tapped into this but I'll provide an opportunity for longer explanation for brothers to weigh in as well. And go ahead. So, a little bit more into detail what I was talking about. I looked at the AIS image with the lease area stuck in between two shipping channels. There's been some discussion from the European literature that these wind farms function as a kind of refuge, because there's, for example, you're not allowed to do fishing in the area and so on. You're putting something in that could have either a positive or a negative effect, given the particular location and the mix of species. So I really think it's important to start getting an idea of what animals are doing specifically in the field of the wind farm with techniques that allow you to get close range behavioral information. So if that's not part of the technical and research goal, it should be. The other thing that came into my head as they were talking about quieting vessels. We have quieter cars around us nowadays. And one of the things that's been necessary is to make at close range, these vehicles more detectable to animals. So this is something that probably I know it's something that's been looked at in the past, but it's something that probably deserves a second look, not only for ships, but also for the farm structures themselves. Because you've got this big thing you're sticking in the ocean and you don't really know how animals are figuring out that it's there. You and any other thoughts from our panelists on this topic. I know you each offered a few areas that could be further explored Doug, you were going to say something go ahead. Well, one thing I was going to say is that after after the list of Jill's projects that are that are done or you know published or you know in process it's hard to, it's hard to think of something else so. There's certainly a nod to to bone in there and the thoroughness of that group so. So I think that they, there are a lot of things that they're hitting on in there. To speak to answer question we part of part of our project is actually to do some of that close in close and behavioral observations and collection. I think the additional additional things I don't know I mean I think that a lot of the so much of this work is going on, like Michael mentioned his work with with drones and body condition of the and things of right whales. I think that one area that. And this this actually hits on both one not questions one and three Stacy and that's the third one is the communication is really forming some kind of. Clearing house for, especially for right whales, you know and everything that we need to know about right whales. You know locations would be the ultimate thing of course if we knew where every one of them was and I don't know how many times I've been asked that question. That gets back to that satellite tagging the implantable tag question I shouldn't say satellite tag because you could do satellite tags. But but the implantable tag issue and what it what it really stands to gain us. And I know there's some attention to that as well so we don't need to we don't need to figure it out today. But I really do think that other other than this, what I call the refer to as the downwind and downstream effects of having turbines in the water. The turbines causing mixing and the, the, or I mean the foundations causing mixing and the turbines pulling energy out of the wind Michael's quite right. And that that we stand, we really need to investigate that more. I don't think it's going to be a quick answer. The modeling could be done relatively quickly and there's there's some work out there we found 30 some papers just in a quick look at this issue. So, so, but I really don't. In terms of big, significant questions. I think Boma know are doing a great job on it. And if I could think of something more broad I would bring it up. But I think get gathering all and NYSERDA has done a great is doing a great job of this with specifically with the RWSC as well. And that information and pointing to new new work that needs to be done. So, so I'll leave it there and but certainly some things to, to come back to you. Thanks. Thank you, Michael. Yeah, so I'll preface my comment by questioning why Doug didn't mention his study were in response to Anne's question in terms of alerts to right Wales in terms of some kind of noise maker what he successfully did was put the whales at 15 feet or thereabouts below the surface and put them into harm's way more than anything else. It is a great study and it's an impossible very difficult solution to reach. I doubt ships will ever be quiet enough that right wells won't know they're there. So with that, I've been thinking recently about the difference between real time management and habitat curation. Can you, well, you're never going to tag all the right wells for instance this is a debate we had last week at a workshop and you're never going to do it because the tax don't last that long, and you're never going to find them all to tag them again and you're quiet that you've lost them and it's just not going to work. So, so scale that back to where you are, when you've got an operation going on with pile driving or whatever and you've got a PSO looking, and so on. Does that really work. Do we know how efficient PSO's are to clear an area versus Pam, and how all of that goes. And that leads into my hobby horse of, you know, what do we really know about the reality of suddenly full impacts, and how to mitigate them and again, it comes down to curating habitats rather than creating individuals, because you're never going to know where all the individuals are right wells can sneak up on you they can show up in the Cape Cod Canal and everybody knew they were there and boom they are in the middle. Two weeks ago. And you know that place has got thermal cameras and video and kinds of stuff go. So, I, and I talked back to my initial comment about rarity. These guys are increasingly cryptic because there are fewer and fewer of them. And so to try and think that we can actually manage the individuals when we're not very good at finding them and they're really good at showing up in the wrong is something that really worries me and, you know, that's something I mean I think, you know, some of the stakeholders have already written the right well species off because there aren't enough of them to worry about anymore. And I'm not saying bones doing that at all, but we can't afford to do that if we do care about conserving the species so it's the whole challenge is huge. I don't have any answers for it, but I do know that we need to think about sub lethal trauma because without. And this is where I do feel very strongly that for instance the stakeholder of the entanglement folks, you know the fishery folks have been misled by by the promise that if you stop killing them everything's going to be okay well that's not the case and that we've got serious reproductive problems as a result of chronic entanglement trauma, sub lethal entanglement trauma. Right well is getting tangled between zero and 10 times in their lives is the current current spread so obviously that's a different thing to wind energy trauma, but it's, it's not when it comes to sub lethal issues that unless we manage them right we're never going to get a fit fat population that's that can actually produce. And that understanding is the piece that I feel has been a strategically and management of inadequate seriously inadequate in terms of how we've looked at it and I strongly disagree that this humpback mortality event has been a wind energy issue. It's been a vessel issue primarily from the information we have. But that doesn't mean that bone in the wind industry doesn't need to worry very significantly. In fact, more so about the sub lethal and it does about the lethal because I don't see bone killing whales for sound. But I do see them adding to, for instance right well health issues to the point where another cut of 1000 cuts to to the success of the species not because you're not killing them but because you're not letting them be who they are and doing that thing. Yeah, I didn't want to if Francine has something on that point certainly go ahead. I am I have a separate points that if you have a follow up to Michael you can go. Okay, great thanks Francine. I think I like Michael's thought on curating habitats. And I think that certainly fits into the quieting, the quieting part of this. So one thing that did occur to me to point out is is the regulatory hurdle that we have to get over in a couple ways one is implementing new things, which we all know is, you know, it has a process and the process is important. But it does, it does take time. But even if we look at something like if vibratory pile driving was a possibility. You know, from what I understand it has been demonstrated in Europe not terribly successfully but certainly with some success in the right and the right substrates is that the message that, well, the issue is that it's then considered a continuous signal. And so then the threshold drops to 120. And so, so then you're taking a, what is something that's going to actually put less sound in the water. And you're making, and you're removing an incentive to do that, and incentivizing things to curate habitats is a really important way, especially when you're dealing with with industry and trying to understand what their needs are and they need to proceed. You know what the playing field is. So I think the the I'm concerned that you know any of these ideas for curating habitats will run into regulatory issues and everybody's aware of it I know it's not it's not new news. But I, but I think it's, it's a great sentiment and I think we can apply that to several things, the curating habitats. So, and like, like suction buckets will you know I don't know but you want to get into details but it's a lot quieter than than pile driving. And that kind of thing could be incentivized by bone. Okay, thanks, Francine. Yeah, I just, I had a couple of other ideas in response to this question and bringing it back to the site assessment and characterization activities a little bit I mean I and thinking about that public trust question right so I think one of the trends that has been in these survey activities are showing is an increase of parallel survey efforts within a single geographic region. For example the same developer may be using you know multiple vessels within a together information for a single project within one region. And are in adjacent regions off the east coast and multiple developers, you know as they're being at the same time but in different areas. And I think you know as you're digging through the IHAs to try and get this information. The IHAs are really broad it's just kind of like this is the number of vessels the developer will use over this nine month period and this is the outline of the geographic area that will be operating within and usually those areas can be really large from you know even from the mid-Atlantic all the way up into Cape Cod and as a member of the public and actually is there. In this context of like a scientific question just being able to correlate even when and where those activities are happening with some type of event or interaction that may or may not have involved in marine mammal. It's really tricky to do that with the data that seems to be available at least for the public. And so you know I think some additional, maybe it's not exactly scientific information but it could inform you know scientific investigation is more specific data on the location of survey vessels and the speeds of those vessels at any given time. And I think that would help you know as improved this happening offshore it might help with kind testing and things like that to build the interaction that may have occurred. The other thought that I had was related also to vessel strikes and being able to better understand the spatial and temporal patterns in vessel traffic again including speeds. Within the proximity of our showing areas but then also you know outside of those areas are wind energy areas any different to you know other areas along the eastern sea border or the regions could be really helpful in passing out risk and public perception of risk. And just I had one other thought here. Oh, and the other thing with big trends in shipping or vessel traffic was being some significant shifts in when and where vessels are operating at the time. I think the New York New Jersey port just overtook the port of Los Angeles is being the busiest port in the nation and that you know could have some implications of vessel strike risk in the region. And I guess more recommendations and updates of it could inform scientific analysis but those types of analyses I think would, would help us all better understand risk and also help the public understand, you know, where there might be risk levels that we could become the best systems that we've been probably, you know, not not very as much about. And in the discussion that Doug and Michael had one of the and a number of the speakers brought it up as well. The use that strikes me is the numbers that they're using for impulsive and continuous noise are have been in have been used for basically my whole career, and they don't at this point really get to the details of how these sounds are affecting the animals ability to function. I think another area ought to be having a much closer look at what it is exactly the sounds are doing to the animals capacity to get their job done. And based on those things coming up with criteria that are more nuanced, because I think that would help a lot of the issues related to noise. You touched on, I think, you know, in various parts of each of your comments, I think we've touched on all three of the questions. I might focus in a little bit Francine you touched on some public perception issues. I might ask the other speakers as well to weigh in on how these very technical issues can be communicated perhaps more effectively or more thoroughly. And I think it's important for the public and even to others within the scientific discipline really. And then Doug. Well, I can give you an analogy, not analogy, but a parallel experience of trying to communicate rope trauma in right Wales I've been trying to to the general public and I've been trying to do that for 30 years. I have been reading it for 30 years now. I've been reading it for 30 years now. I've read it in 1550, and 1500 people 3000 people and I know read it maybe and I put on my heart and really I know the choir liked it. But we do not have a good way of communicating to the public good science in a way that is meaningful in their daily lives. educate our kids. And these are all things that are coming in through the mailbox or, well, virtual or real. And how to get the offshore abstract into the persona of the minds, the concerns, the costs, the benefits of you and me, if we don't have the particular jobs we have is something that I'd love an answer to. Thank you, Doug. I think Michael just is advocating for an offshore wind and right well Instagram account. I was thinking TikTok, actually. I was thinking, maybe severely limited in the coming days, well, who knows? And I would pay a lot of money to see you sing and dance, Michael, if we could arrange it. I've been rehearsing. So it's a really, it's a very good question. And I'll just give you one anecdote to just encapsulate. And I'm sure we all had these experiences, but a friend of mine here in Beaufort, who works at NOAA, not in anything related, but does habitat mapping with acoustics was out somewhere wearing a NOAA jacket or something like that. And somebody in the community stopped him and said, oh, are you helping that whale? This was when we had this entangled right whale down here. And he said, oh, no, but the team from Duke is doing a lot. And then the folks from Georgia, Florida went through the whole thing. And then this woman said, well, and it's awful what that offshore wind is doing to the whales. He just, you know, that's the, the connections are obviously not non-existent. We all know, but getting that word across is really, it's important. I thought the video that Erica showed, I know those, we're getting better at producing those things. And maybe AI, that would be a good use of AI is to produce more of those relatively quick and getting them into the circulation as Michael said, as broadly as possible. I'm not a great fan of playing to the short attention spans that sort of dominate the whole world these days, but at the same time, if you can get across a concept that and stick to one or a few, especially with things like acoustics because people just glaze over very quickly. But I do think that developing more of those animations can, they can be really powerful and infographics too. So, and then plug them into Michael's Instagram account. I'll be a follower. I just before turning quickly to Francine, I thought I'd also add my own sort of element to this question, which is thinking about conversations that the coast has had in the past and particularly the two-way engagement, that we keep hearing is really important in science communication and the listening aspect as well as the speaking. I guess I'm wondering, I want to turn to Francine as well, but I'm wondering if you all have any thoughts about how that can be done effectively on this topic, especially in light of the attention that this has been getting. Francine, I'll turn to you next and then ask folks to give some thought to that. Okay, yeah, thanks, Stacey and Jess. I know I already kind of weighed in on this question, but I had a couple of other specific thoughts. And one was the same as that, it's about the really wonderful interactive educational materials that the volunteer and others have been developing. Now I was working on these two and just getting that out more broadly and promoting that work more broadly, I think would be helpful. I think even with that, there's always going to be some mistrust of information issued by agencies, regulating an industry, also the industry. And so it is really important for independent scientists or entities like the Marine animal commission to also be communicating these steps to the general public. And this also points to the need for information on off-shore indexes like I was saying, I like to be shared more openly, so scientists do have that information to consider and they can feel confident in their speaking on these issues. Just one other thing, which has never been thought of, you know, I think the acoustic impact from survey activities, it's quite easy to explain, well, not easy, but there's explanation as to why not that very low source levels, we can explain it through video, charts and clients. I think as we look forward to construction and operations where, you know, there's not, it's as impact, apologizing of particular processes, there's going to be much greater sound and acoustic energy in the water at that time. There's going to be more vessels out there, you know, tens of vessels during the construction period. It may be a little bit more challenging for us to communicate around that when, you know, a whale happens to coincidentally strand at the same time. And so one thing that NRDC has started to do, and I think it would be helpful for us all to do is kind of look ahead to that next phase and kind of use this as a training ground of how well to, you know, communicate on these issues and really prepare for that next round of communication to the public that's going to be needed around this. Yeah, Stacey, really. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, Doug, and then Ann. Yeah, real quick, I won't be long, but it's something prompted. And then Francine, of course, set me up perfectly. And that is to engage the industry side of things. I alluded to it. They have marching orders, they have their leases, and they, you know, in this case, are trying to produce renewable energy that I think most of us agree we need. But Francine's point also about what people trust and what they hear. And maybe some of these little productions that have, you know, an industry stamp on it and the BOM stamp on it and academic stamp on it and an NGO stamp on it, then people look at it and go, oh, everybody agrees that this is, you know, this is what we're actually looking at, that that might be a little bit more powerful. But I just wanted to bring in that, you know, I hear from, you know, our contacts in the various developers saying, hey, look, we're not going to come out and say anything about this because no, they won't, you know, people won't believe us. But if it comes from you or NRDC or, you know, some combination that is more likely to be taken on board, thanks. Thank you, Anne. One other thing that so far we haven't talked about is that people who are out there in the world, in the ocean, people who have time on their hands, can participate in community science. And that's a really great way of helping people understand what's going on in a situation without pushing information at them. So in other words, they're the ones that are discovering something. And maybe that helps them understand the information better. The burden community has certainly made a lot of progress doing that. Fantastic, great suggestion, Anne. So I see Les has raised his hand. And I think approaching the four o'clock hour, this is a great time to open it up for our audience as well and for COSA members to weigh in with their questions too. So we'll let Les start that off. Les, go ahead. Just on that same thread, and this, my gosh, I think it was this morning, I was on a meeting of the WINS subcommittee of the Advisory Council for Stelwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, which I've been put onto. I'm not sure I even knew that. And it occurred to me, the sanctuary, of course the discussion had to do with potential impacts to the sanctuary of wind anywhere near it. But I was trying to turn people's thoughts the other way. And the sanctuary definitely could be, the sanctuary system could be an important avenue for public communication, especially if they had some help. So I wouldn't forget about them. And as one example of citizen science, Anne, we're now analyzing 10 years of bird sighting data from Stelwagen that was done systematically. And it's gonna prove useful for some of the wind planning. Yep. Great example, Les, thanks for sharing that. I'll look for any other hands from our audience, invited guests or co-members, foam staff as well. Kevin, and then Scott. Yeah, thank you. So I want to ask a question to the panel about, in listening to the discussion, I've heard a couple of things. One of them is about the prey and the shifts in prey for these species. And I guess so my first thought on that is that I think John showed in his presentation that there were actually a number of different species that have been stranded, sperm whales, semis, right whale and humpbacks. And they do, I think the right whale is mostly copepods, right? I believe calonectes, but some of the others, I heard menhaden mentioned and squid. So that's a variety of different prey. And I'm not sure that the scientific assessments of where these prey are in actual field observations and how they're shifting with climate changes is very well understood. I know we have a modeling exercise about to commence with the National Academy of Sciences, but do you feel that the field research is adequate enough to be able to tell these different prey sources? And I guess the second component of that is that why would such a variety of different animals be stranding themselves or having high mortality if their prey is different? Do you think that all the prey is overlapping? Or does that suggest some other source of a mentality rather than chasing prey? Well, I could attempt to answer that. I think the different UMEs are very independent and I think geographically so too. I mean, to compare a sperm whale stranding with a humpback whale stranding is like trying to understand Mars by looking at the moon. They're such very, very different animals and most sperm whale strandings are due to pathology. I don't know what the data was, but it's probably a sick animal. And to compare menhaden with gopepods, right whale foraging strategy is so very, very different to juvenile humpbacks who do like small menhaden. So there are so many niche pieces to this each story that I think it's hard to try and pull together a holistic understanding of all these UMEs. And the sperm whales aren't having a UME, but that just happened to be stranding. So it's a very diverse challenge to try and pull the threads together. And the one question you asked about, do we have enough data from the science and so on? I'm a strong believer in listening to fishermen as well. And the fishermen will tell you that the pogies are running good intro. So to follow up just very quickly, would you advocate then for just focusing on the right whale rather than some of the other whales or do we try and take it as a holistic approach? Well, I believe strongly that holistic is the way to go to understand the systems. I mean, if you look at the sort of rank order of extinction, you've got the vaquita, which is a Mexican porpoise that has got in a less than 10 animals alive. You've got the right whale with less than 1000 animals alive and you've got the humpback with probably less than 100,000. I don't know what the number is, but where goes one goes the other as we go down the slippery slope of industrialization of the coastal ocean. That's what we're doing. Thank you. Yeah, great discussion. I want to thank all of our panelists for joining us today. In this morning session or this after earlier sessions today, one of the things I came away with is that it sounded like a pretty broad consensus that it leads for the right whales and the humpbacks. Bessel strikes and entanglements were key contributors to the mortality events that have been recognized in the last several years. And looking ahead to where offshore wind is going to go, two of the most attractive areas from an energy potential, one is the Gulf of Maine, the other is the Pacific, parts of the Pacific coast, they're both going to require floating wind to be viable. And in fact, they're both going to probably require floating wind at depths, water depths beyond where floating wind has yet gone. So it's another technological challenge. But I'm just wondering from a Marine mammals protection perspective, are we doing adequate research into the risks of entanglements with floating wind mooring systems at this point or secondary entanglements with fishing gear that might get entangled with the mooring lines or the... Well, I guess that's in my game again. There's little data to really answer your question. There was a Southern right whale entangled in a mooring chain in Patagonia, but I believe it was slack. And so that's really not a good example. These moorings are going to be very substantial. I don't know the diameter, depends upon, they're going to be big and stiff. And so I don't sweat that too much. Rope in any guise is a threat. And so if you've got here wrapped around a pylon or a mooring, it's a problem. I want to pick up a little bit on Anne's comment about sanctuaries. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the spacing of the U.S. pylon grids allows for fishing between them. Is that right? Because if so, it's a nod of sanctuary in that regard. I can comment on that one quickly, if that'll help. It's a one by one, not a Kamal grid, at least in the Northeast. Neither the Coast Guard nor the wind firm companies are specifically saying that you cannot fish within there, but for trawled gear, things like sculpt dredges or groundfish gear, it'll be fairly difficult to perhaps less so for gear that is potted gear and gear with ropes and such. It may turn out that, especially given the habitat changes, it may increase, for example, the number of lobster or crabs within there. And so you may have more fishing, but I think that a little bit remains to be seen on the safety and ability to get in there and what the insurance companies will allow. And they would be fishing for right whales too. So it will be a strong case to be made to make that on-demand gear a requirement for any such places. Yeah, I'm gonna turn to Francine, Doug, and then Anne. I believe you're each responding to Scott's question if I understand it correctly. Go ahead, Francine. Thanks, Daisy. I just wanted to speak real briefly to Scott, your question about entanglement. And I also agree with Michael that the infrastructure, the mooring lines and the inter-array tables are likely to be quite large and stiff. And so the risk of what we're turning a primary entanglement or an animal may get directly entangled in the infrastructure is the risk is probably quite low. I mean, we still think it's something that we should be looking for. But our concern, and this is shared by several of the ENGOs that kind of work on that intersection between entanglement and floating wind is the idea of marine debris. Those gear getting caught around that infrastructure are indeed a right whale. All of the large whale dragging gear, potentially that gear getting caught around and clinging that animal. So we've, and I can find this link to put it in the chat for folks, but we developed some ENGO recommendations for monitoring those cables fairly regularly using different tools. And then having a mitigation strategy if marine debris is observed. How can we get that marine debris off quickly? What kinds of technologies would we need to advance? So first to be able to do that for these big commercial scale projects at an affordable cost. So I'll find the recommendations, put them in the chat. We're also doing a deeper dive into those potential technology solutions. So we'll hopefully have a bit more information on that soon. But one opportunity I think that's really important is the main research array that will be, I think it's like only one or two floating turbines. But can we use that as a test bed for some of these technologies and proof of concept? So really make the most of that opportunity that's coming up in the near term. So that that can involve either lodges to be able to build that off of the Gulf of Spain or indeed also for West Coast where an entire woman of large Wales is also a key concern. And I know DOE is looking at that question as well. Thank you Francine. We'll do Doug, Ann and then Brian. Yeah, thanks Stacey. Just quickly on this entanglement issue that's where I put it in the chat. Several of us have been working on a 3D simulator to look at this potential for entanglement risk to whales and leatherback sea turtles for that matter. Primary, secondary, and tertiary entanglement. I do think it is one of those. So that simulator you can run animals by. It's physically, it's mechanically explicit. It will calculate drag and the force on animals based on the gear and the anyway. So it can be a very effective model for evaluating some of these things, particularly how animals behave when they hit some of the gear. The other part I think is important though is to look at this probabilistically if we can. How much ghost gear is actually out there floating around? What are the chances it will get stuck on those cables if it does come by? I don't know what we have for numbers in terms of ghost gear, but it seems like the downwind and downstream issue, something that we can learn a lot on the desktop as well as trying to implement some of these things that Francine just mentioned. Yep, that was it on that. Thanks, Stacy. Thank you. We'll go to Ann and then Brian and then La. Okay, what I have to ask is right quick, with the floating gear, the other issue with having these arrays of great long lines on the water is, it isn't clear how well these animals figure out that something is in their way. So you also have to think about the issue of them coming into contact with it. In other words, there's a collision risk and it's not clear exactly how that'll cope with that situation, how that would interact with, particularly for the smaller animals if they're using it as a hunting environment and for the larger ones, just how they detect it. Brian? Thanks, maybe I'll talk a little bit about, Desiree put in the chat that we are doing some modeling of looking at how animals might interact and with offshore floating facilities right now, it's an active study. And we'll say a lesion, there wouldn't be a collision because they're static. I know my Coast Guard friends would appreciate that difference. But actually the reason I initially raised my hand was that kind of going off what we were talking earlier about access, fisheries access, I think I just want to point out that we assume, at least for fixed gear on the Atlantic, we're assuming there's always going to be some level of fisheries exploitation within the facility. I know there's challenges that Kevin raised, but for our assessment purpose, we assume that the biomass will continue to be exploited. And again, just to really clarify that it, any management measures around fisheries that are operating within or adjacent to facilities would still be within the jurisdiction of the natural fishery service and not bone. So just want to make sure that was clear. Thank you. Thank you very much, Brian. Michael, you had your hand up briefly. Was that to respond to this point as well? Well, that was relating to, and I was just taking a comment, but I'll say it, if a right whale is doing two to three knots and runs into a fat cable, I don't worry about it. They run into fat whales quite often too. Michael, let's. Hey, I did it this time. Yeah, a number of us on this call and others have been fretting over this ghost gear issue on the catenary cables. And my greatest concern, I know we can use the things once they're constructed to study whether that's a serious problem or not, but my concern is the lag time to get a study going. And I mean, while we're sitting around going through our process, there really could be a big problem. And if the problem involves right whales, which is a possibility, I suppose, it's really serious. So we should think about how we can anticipate the need for that kind of study and be ready the moment the gun goes off. What a horrible analogy. You know, I just, let me just add one more thing here on this since I brought this up. There are an awful lot of floating moored structures in the oil and gas business. And a lot of them are in the Gulf of Mexico monitored by Bessie and BOEM. And there's been a lot of, there is actually quite a bit of recreational fishing that occurs around some of these. In some cases, they come mighty close to the structures. There may be some research opportunities down there, stuff that's ongoing or maybe things that could be done to kind of monitor around existing structures that have already been deployed. You know, what the impact are with large mammals? Do they ignore them completely? Do they have to hit them? Could be another source of information and I would encourage our BOEM colleagues to talk to their colleagues in the Gulf of Mexico, both from BOEM and Bessie. Thank you, Scott. Michael, is your hand still up? It is because I had something to say in terms of the question about catenary and Leslie's question. And you know, there is some precedent, you know, you've got navigational marks and offshore buoys and so on, which presumably may or may not be accumulated on ghost gear at this point. There's certainly plenty of ghost gear on the bottom and you know, any Drago will tell you that all over the place. And you know, the number of right whales that have come in with ghost gear on them is really very small compared to the actively fished gear. And this is one of my hobby horses is that the not-for-profit campaign against ghost gear has been popular and fundable because there's no political cost or there is huge political cost to go and have to actively fish gear. And there's been a huge bias and tension as a result of that. Any other questions from folks? I apologize. I know there's a very active chat going on. I encourage that. I have not been monitoring it for the purposes of integrating questions, but you know, if there are folks having robust discussions on the chat, I encourage you to raise those and the discussions for the benefits of all. But I will continue to look for any additional hands at this time. So let's sort of ask my question, which is this question of lag time. You know, Bohm has a process for considering science needs and coming up with an SDP and then doing the studies and then producing the data. So we need to not only think about what we need to know today, but what we will need to know in five years from now. And it may be that we can identify some of those questions or it may be that we need to think about doing some of the science in slightly different ways, trying to figure out how to be more nimble. So I wondered if any of the panelists had any thoughts about that, whether we can effectively anticipate some of the questions we might need to know answers to in four years time or whether the answer is that we need to be more nimble with some of the science and be able to come up with results or have studies that can sort of continually provide the kind of information we need. Step in forward looking. Thanks to everybody. Not a lot comes to mind immediately. I do think that the Bohm process can take a little while, although I do know that they are responsive. And like I said with that list that Jill put up, that there's quite a lot going on enough to make me even struggle coming up with new things. But I do think that this idea of thinking about data collection avenues that can be useful for several years is a good way to go. And I'll actually go back to my thought about the sort of right wheel clearinghouse kind of approach where we centralize as much as possible. So there's one place to go to the North Atlantic right wheel consortium does a great job based at the New England Aquarium in terms of curating the catalog and a huge sightings database. But that's not the kind of not exactly what I'm thinking of in terms of aggregating all the data that we have, but it's also they're not set up to be that sort of quick response kind of situation. I do worry a little bit about saying, yes, here, this is a need that's identified today. Here somebody, here's a bunch of money tomorrow go and do it to the best of your ability without the scoping of the questions and how to structure the study. You may end up with data that's insufficient or my camera who was today talked about making sure we have the power to actually detect changes. And so things are set up to be actually able to detect changes is a big part of our whole first year with the WAL project is doing power analysis and encounter rates and what things we can undertake given all of that and how best to do it. So these things obviously as you all are well aware take time to set up, but I think it's a very good idea and sentiment to think about what things we can put in place to streamline it and also to be a good avenue and a good pathway to get the data out and available. Sorry, I couldn't solve it. Oh, bummer, shock stuck. Any other thoughts from our panelists? We have a robust audience still on the line about 97 participants that looks like. I'd like to ask if any of them have questions they'd like to pose to our panelists or to the presenters from today as well. I encourage participation from bone staff and also from others on the line. Oh, there so. Kate Williams. Hey, thanks everyone. This has been a great conversation. I have a question for the panel. I guess, are there particular aspects of the WAL stranding issue in relation to offshore wind that you feel like need particular sort of communication support to help address? So I work with groups that are trying to think about like, do we develop some educational material, like outreach information? And I'm trying to figure out there's so many aspects to this issue in terms of like, how do you do any proxy? Well, what are you and me is like, there's a lot of different things that you could focus educational information on to try to address parts of this issue. And I was wondering if folks have thoughts on like, what are the pieces that feel the most urgent or that you're hearing about the most in your work that people sort of need the most information on that isn't readily available or pulled together right now? Thanks. Very good question, Kate. Thanks for asking. Michael, I see your hands up. Sure. Well, I think, you know, your comment, the WAL strandings in relation to offshore wind has become a conspiracy theory that needs to be debunked. And, you know, that's, it seems as though the harder you push at such things, the more they conspire to continue. And so that's a challenge, you know, I'm not just gonna try and get political here at all, but it, when whales become a political football to take on a particular partisan agenda, we've gone down a tube that is kind of sad. And so how to, I mean, in many ways, it's so much bigger than a right whale or a humpback whale at this point. It's, we're all here in part because of all of that and the public attention and the media and so on. And how to bring some objectivity and data and sanity and the real questions of concern that we have talked about today in addition to some of these issues, that's the real challenge. Michael, any other feedback from our panelists on this? Yeah, oh, Jill, I'll just think quickly, Stacey, if I can, I think the website that Noah put up very quickly, I think, I don't know what the analytics are on it, but that kind of simple, it's one page, not complicated. Here's the issue and here's what the fishery service has determined is really good. And I know I've gotten lots of questions about, well, why aren't they all the animals knee crops needed? Why don't we know the cause of death right away? And so a little bit in there about what the process is for actually determining the cause of death would be helpful. But I think it doesn't have to be elaborate. We don't have to make a infomercial every time. So, but getting the information readily available, I think would be really helpful. And to Kate's point, I don't know exactly how to plug into that. I'm not a communications person, but I just want to make a pitch for the, for simple is fine. It doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be complicated. Is that Jill? Yeah, so, yeah, so there clearly are. So, so Boam is doing a number of things besides, you know, trying to put out information, like editorials, or we're trying to, we've got a lot of reach outs from, like community organizations that are having meetings to come and speak. And so we're trying to do that kind of thing, somewhat ironically, like the video and all the HRG, the paper and all that we did. I mean, everyone here knows, you can't do an analysis like that and get it peer reviewed and published in the timeframe. We happened to have it done, right? And we had, we made the video because we're like, it's going to be complicated to understand the paper, but we understood that people are interested in noise issues. So, so, so I have a place I'm going with all of this. So I think we do what we can to try to put information in the places where it will matter, because I would agree there are places, it doesn't matter what you say. There's an alternative motive, perhaps to raise these things. But there's also another part of this that is there's a lot of agency time that is spun up to address this, whether it's from an outreach perspective, responding to the many, many, many news articles and reporters calling to congressional letters and potential committee meetings and threats of litigation and all those things. And it just takes time away from all these things that we talked about for like getting the right rail strategy done and focusing in on the areas that we believe have the potential for an impact. It takes time away from that. And I think that's, this is more commentary on my part, but every so often, there's something that comes along where you do scratch your head a bit and you're like, this is not really, really not the issue to be concerned about, but yet it's going to take time, energy, money away from us making advances on the stuff that we need to get out in front of. So no real answer to it, but just sort of recognizing that cost. And I think that time spent spreads, right? So lots of folks have been spending time trying to write up things and recount it, but I think at heart, if there's a way to better get to the general public who may not understand and are concerned, I don't know if DOSITS or some sort of organization like that, but we just recognize there's the other part of this that it is about confusing the message and creating the urgency and we're not going to be able to address that. Thank you, Jill. I think that was a great audience question and I welcome others as well. It's 429, now we've got a fair bit of time left on our agenda if we want to continue, but certainly if we feel like we've exhausted the topic, we don't have to. So a few folks, just a couple more moments to see if any other questions come to folks. Again, I'll apologize. I'm not actively monitoring the chat. I continue to see the numbers going up. So if there's some robust discussion in the chat, I really do encourage folks to bring that out into the conversation as well. Scott and then Kevin. So yeah, Jill, this is a question I posed, a follow-up question I posed on the chat and I don't know if you got to see it or not, but you very kindly answered. Well, we heard today a lot has been learned about the incidents involving whales over the last 10 years. We've learned so much in a relatively short amount of time. The story changes of course with external factors as well, you know, what's impacting things. And it sounds like from what you said that if you learn something from research before leasing that indicates you should have certain stipulations in the leases that would allow you to put mitigation measures in place for instance during construction or operations, you can put those in at the time of the leasing. If new information comes up after leases have been awarded and the leases are basically paid for, are you able to go back and add those mitigations retroactively or do you have to renegotiate? How does that work? Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I think when we put out the right whale strategy we actually worked with our attorneys at least on the bowmen to come up with language to that effect. So it would be incorrect to say that once a lease is issued and you have your mitigations applied and contained in the cop approval that you can never go back and make an adjustment, right? So we do have the ability to do that. Now, are you gonna adjust constantly on all things? No, because there's a level of that that may have safety issues or there's a level of predictability that is important to this. But for example, we have, let's say you have a endangered species at consultation and there are triggers for that for re-initiation. And every consultation will list off what those triggers are. So if a trigger is met and we re-initiate and re-re-consult and there's an outcome of that we're going to need to go back and we're gonna need to apply them to things that have already been approved. So there is the room for that. There's also the room for us to apply mitigation and through other research or monitoring of the mitigation we find it's not terribly helpful or needed to also adaptively manage and pull that back. So that's always sort of been the case. But of course, there is a lot of thoughtfulness that goes in anytime you make a change but it is one that if it's warranted, we'll pursue it. Thank you. Thank you. Coming next to Kevin. Thank you. I guess my question is a little more on the board looking similar to a couple of last comments but to reach 30 gigawatts by 2030, it's gonna take about 2,400 turbines and vineyard wind starting to construct this summer they're gonna have at least 22, I think, vessels in a rather small area to put in their 62 turbines. So that's a lot of increased traffic. And then also I know that the Canadian wind farm industry is about to ramp up and a lot of the presentations we've seen on the right whales today have been focused just in the US but there's also gonna be a great deal of work up there. So I was wondering what the committee thought about scientific way, I mean, really the wind farm development really hasn't, I mean, the sightings developed but as Brian showed in his planning strategy at the first we're just at the very beginning. Are we doing enough? Are there other studies or things that we should be thinking about to try and get ready for what's coming down the pipe because the development's gonna be very quick and now's the time to set any additional studies up. Kevin, Doug, would you like to respond to that? Yeah, thanks for one thing pops to mind. I think the couple things on the vessels in a conversation recently with one of the developers I gathered that at least for their construction all the vessels are gonna be dynamically positioned so there's not gonna be any jack up. And I think I mentioned this that the dynamic positioning can be quite loud. So I imagine that's been taken into account but I also know that there and I don't think there's gonna be a lot of vessels out there. I just, I don't know what this, one thing that would be good to get from the developers is what the traffic is really set to be once the farms are operational. I know there's a lot of concern about increased vessel traffic to and from the actual sites once it's developed and operational. I just, I don't know how often they have to go out to the turbines and that would be a good thing to find out. I do know there's been a lot of discussion about vessel corridors and that is something we can get out ahead of. I gather there's some pretty elaborate ideas and plans for how to monitor those corridors. We did very successfully with very well's obstacle and it's not quite the same situation but we looked at the area where, we looked at whale densities, we looked at where the vessels needed to go and suggested some corridors and speeds within them. So those are things we can get up in front of and have ready, ready to go. So that's just one thought about the vessel corridors in terms of the operational phase. Bill, did you want to weigh in on that? Yes. That's how you come up with it. I did, I did. Yeah, so, yeah, on the vessel. So in the cops there, you know, there's something called the project design envelope that does describe out within a range what will be required from, you know, vessels during construction and operation, those sorts of things. I think as developers are moving further along and, you know, getting a better understanding of their needs, that's becoming clear and clear but I do think the information is there. I think some of what is also, you know, so the projects, they're coming in fast. Yes, there's no way about, you know, but it does take a while between when something is submitted, is it, is it sufficient? Have they, we're coming out right now with, we're calling, I think a cop checklist, an NOI checklist, NOI checklist. And what that basically means is in order for your cop application to be deemed sufficient, here's everything you have to have in there. And if you have everything in there in a way that we believe is sufficient, then we'll move to the notice of intent, which is the NOI, which starts your NIVA process. So, and what we've seen is some of these cop applications come in in various forms. Some are really mature and some are sort of still learning as they go. So there is a period of time was my point between when you get something submitted and even the ones we have right now, until things are built out, there's also supply chain issues, are there sufficient vessels available? So there, you know, I feel the pressure for sure, but there is a wider space between as these things will be built out than what we actually might feel at first. So time to adapt, time to sort of adjust and change. Our environmental studies program, yes, we do go through in order for it to be a fair and competitive process. We do look three years out and we update it every year. We do solicit input from stakeholders. There's a call that goes out once a year, although anytime anybody can certainly reach out. So that helps us a little bit get ahead, but there's only so much funding available for that. So I don't know what the exact statistic would be, but I would sort of pull out that of all the ideas that go in, we're probably able to maybe fund 25% of the ideas that come in in a given year. So we look for partners all the time, partners, partners, and I think too, we're looking at the regional wildlife, I kept upset RWSE a few times, but the regional wildlife science collaborative, I think is the right word. They're coming out with a research plan. We're gonna try to link with that. We work a lot with DOE to try to get out in front of, okay, maybe there's some technology development or the vessel quieting and working with ports. One of the things that we may be doing with DOE is a prize competition or similar to get better quieting technology for impact pile driving. So there's lots of like tendrils you're putting out to try to be more proactive and try to get out in front. And I personally believe too, when it comes to like the right whales that we really need to lean as much as we can in predictive tools and trying to get better tools so we can maybe and ideally in real time, try to get a better educated guess of where they may be showing up versus reacting once they're there when impacts can potentially happen. So I am rambling a little bit, but there are ways for us to get out in front of things, but it is big for sure in the partnerships and the feedback that we get from things like this are super helpful for us to be sure we're thinking of all the different things we need to be. I'll give one last opportunity for any additional thoughts or questions. And then I'll ask for each of our panelists maybe just to provide one or two concluding thoughts. And then I will turn to our co-chairs and we will wrap up. So any other hands? Last chance. I mean, the folks on the line want to weigh in or ask a question. I think our panelists are perhaps largely off the hook then. Let me just ask them each maybe if they have sort of one or two takeaways, one or two things they want us to take away or that they want the group to make sure we get from this meeting. And I'll start, maybe I can start with Doug and then Anne Francine and then Michael. Yeah, I don't know that I have a lot that hasn't already been said, Stacey, but thanks for the opportunity. I think that a huge part of this obviously is a public relations issue on the strandings and the wind. We've talked about a lot of priorities and a lot of things that we really like to know, but we know that there's no connection between the two. And so I think it is a PR issue I saw that somebody put in the chat that Erica did a Instagram thing, so that's great. I mean, I think those things can go a long way. So, but beyond that, no, I don't think I have anything else. I appreciate the conversation and the invitation. Thanks, Stacey. Absolutely, thank you, Doug. Anne, anything you'd like to add? Other than this has been very valuable and thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to learn a lot. What I'm hoping is that down the line, it will be possible for anybody who's interested in this area to basically see what life is like for one of these animals moving through the industrial activities that we have going on because I think that's really what's missing from this whole debate about the stranded whales is that people don't really, in their minds, picture what's happening to these animals as they move about in their environment. So anything we can do to do a better job of making that accessible to them would be fantastic. Wonderful feedback, thank you. Francine. Yeah, thanks. And I tell them other things for the invitation and I've really appreciated the discussion. Trying to think of something. I think the more that we can do, and again, looking past this issue and to construction operation, I think the more that we can do to communicate and also be doing the work to be reducing impacts as much as we can at the source, be it vessel strike, be it noise reduction, quieting, be it relying on new monitoring technologies and we can really show that that's how this industry is moving forward. And then also that when monitoring the heck out of it, we have a good mechanism to use that monitoring based on such a just cost, that continually reduce risk. I think that's really the key for this industry to move forward as practically as it needs to do and with products upon them. And obviously, obviously we'll use that and do that if it's in large part doing that already. But even moments like this are helpful because they shed light on some issues that maybe need a little bit more of our attention and so hopefully we can take what's been discussed here and clean that up a little bit on some of that. Yeah, thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts. And last but certainly not least, Michael. Well, first thanks so much for the invitation. It's been interesting and I'm sorry, I've been hobbying my horse a bit, but just to reiterate, those dead whales are really informative and we can pay more to get more in terms of data. That being said, the sublethal piece is just as important and it's so much more cryptic and it's hard to get to, but we have to acknowledge that the need to be nice to these guys, to be nice to the habitat. Well, I know I speak on behalf of myself as well as the Coase and members when I thank each of you and each of our presenters today for your time and your thoughtfulness and engaging on the topic. What a lot of folks on the line don't know is that we pulled several of these people together with relatively short notice and we're really grateful and appreciative for your time and recognizing the importance of this discussion. Also wanna thank several other folks that have been willing to join the line that maybe haven't had an opportunity to speak up as much really grateful to have the commissioners from the US Marine Mammal Commission on the line as well and several of the bone staff and other folks that have joined us really appreciate everybody's time and thoughtfulness today. I wanna give our COSA co-chairs an opportunity to have sort of the last word as it relates to today's discussion and then I'll quickly talk a bit about tomorrow's agenda before adjourning the meeting. So Scott, Rod, I'll turn it over to each of you. Well, thanks, Stacy. And let me echo that special thanks to our panelists. You really did a great job for us today and we realized for many of you it was on quite short notice and we appreciate your participation in the entire day's activities. You brought a lot to the table. Also want to thank our presenters from Marine Mammals Commission from OAH and of course, very, very informative. And a special thanks to our new director at Bohm who spent some time with us. That was, I thought, a pretty enlightening discussion and we appreciate her taking time out of her schedule to visit with us. So thanks to all of you who sat in with us today. Just one other thing to keep on in our minds here and I guess this is a special challenge for you, Jill, looking down the road. You're gonna learn a lot about interactions with sound and ships and entanglements and so forth as you expand your wind program. But let's not forget, you may have a couple of the new program areas coming down the road with more activities and critical minerals and who knows, maybe even something in CCS offshore. And so some of the lessons learned here about how to do the best job we can in environmental science and assessment may be relevant down the road for that. So let's keep that in mind. And I turn it over to my esteemed colleague, Rod. You all said it so well. Thank you certainly to Anne and Francine, Michael and Doug and also to our friends from NOAA and also the Bowen staff and subject matter experts and also from the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission. It was a very informative discussion today. It is a subject of course that has immediate public interest which means that it is both additionally important and also complicated. And I've certainly, as I said at the beginning, it's not a subject I know a lot about. I have been in the water a lot and I'll tell you there's a lot of noise down there. If you're on the side of the, if you're on the shoulder of a drenched channel and the vessel goes up, it is noisy as heck. So it's certainly of interest to me from that perspective and I learned a lot. It also, one thing that struck me is the scale and scope of the problem. And it may be that in addition to understanding the science may have to collaborate with a bunch of other partners to try to come to terms with the things that we do need to know and things that we do need to do. I fear the day that the right whale becomes extinct. So with that bright thought, I'll say it once again, thank you to everybody. Thank you, Rod. I will note, I feel a bit remiss. I also want to provide the opportunity for Bill Brown or just the Bravo from Bohm to say any concluding remarks if they have any. So let me at least stop for that opportunity. Bill, I see you took yourself off mute. Yeah, but if Jessica has something to say, I want her to say, yeah, I think this is a great meeting. And I thank all of the panelists and the COSA members. Everybody's doing this on their own time, I know. So I appreciate you carrying it. I listened carefully, absorbed a lot of stuff. Jessica, do you have anything? Jessica, I'm sorry if you're speaking, we can't hear you. I do see you come off mute, but that's not what we're doing. I was on double mute, of course. No, I don't have anything to say today. It has been a great big thank you. You'll hear a lot more from me tomorrow. Appreciate everybody's time today, especially those who joined external to BOME and the committee. You very much appreciate your expertise and input. Yeah, I hope that Scott Cameron and others will appreciate the fact that we've listened to the first in class recommendations and we're just the beginning, but we're starting to roll. Excellent. Well, that's a wonderful segue, Bill. Thank you for setting me up so well just to give folks a quick highlight of tomorrow's agenda and invite folks on the line to join if they're interested. We'll get started tomorrow at noon and we will, as always, do a quick introduction of the committee. And then our first discussion point on the agenda for tomorrow is updates from BOME on a recently completed National Academy study, which we have been referring to as the first in class study. It was a National Academy's report aimed at identifying attributes of a first in class science program within federal agencies. And this was primarily directed at BOME, but intended to be broadly applicable for others that are interested in applying it to their programs as well. So I know BOME has been very actively trying to address some of the recommendations within that report and that's an update on some of that will be our first discussion point tomorrow, which is what Bill mentioned. And then the other primary item on our agenda is to hear a bit about some new National Academy's activities that are getting underway with relevance to BOME. The first is a standing committee that some folks on the line may be interested in that will be focused primarily on the issue of wind energy development and fisheries. And the second item that we'll be highlighting tomorrow is a new consensus study that's going to be on quite a fast track that we'll be looking at the hydrodynamic implications of wind turbines and focusing on any impacts to prey availability. So that may also be of interest to some folks on the line. It will be a relatively short day tomorrow concluding at about 3.15 and that's largely because our committee will be moving into a closed session which will be sort of the first closed session of any duration with our new members. So we're looking forward to having that opportunity to engage with them. With that I want to thank folks again for joining. Invite you all to join us again for our open session tomorrow. The agenda and call and information is available on our website but certainly you can reach out to me to Jonathan Tucker or to Eric Inesco on the line for more information on that. This recording from this meeting will be at some point will be edited and posted up on our website. So folks should be able to revisit this discussion with ease probably in the coming weeks, hopefully. Again, if you have any questions about that please don't hesitate to reach out. And I think with that I can close our open session for the day.