 Hello everyone, good morning and welcome to the second in our four part series from Maine Audubon exploring the potential benefits of offshore wind energy in the Gulf of Maine, as well as its potential environmental impacts. Today, our second presentation called offshore wind and birds we are joined by Dr. Wayne Goodale from the science director at the biodiversity research Institute, and Dr. Roberto Albertani from Oregon State University. Before I introduce our two guests I'd like to talk a little bit about why Maine Audubon is hosting this series. More than a century of burning fossil fuels has already altered the chemical composition of our atmosphere, changing the climate we are accustomed to and throwing the natural world out of balance. Mainers are seeing these changes firsthand as evidenced by the scientifically measured three degrees warming trend in the state since 1895, a growing season which has lengthened by about 16 days. Since 1950 and a Gulf of Maine that is warming faster than almost any other water body on earth. These changes are impacting our wildlife loose populations are falling as the warmer winters are permitting the advancement of deadly ticks. Additionally, Southern species are showing up in Maine woods and waters, including Carolina Ren, Black Sea Bass, Lined Seahorse, and Red Bellied Woodpecker. Modern reports from the National Audubon Society predict that if the current rate of warming continues more than 106 of Maine's bird species will lose habitat by 2050, and some like our iconic common loon will be pushed out of their state breeding range entirely. We need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels or else Maine will no longer be Maine. At the top of the list of ways to achieve this is to convert to electric energy powered by renewable sources. Southern is a longtime supporter of renewable energy dating back to at least the 1970s when our Falmouth headquarters was built with passive solar and radiant heat and continuing through our current work supporting appropriately cited solar and terrestrial wind projects. Therefore, offshore wind in the Gulf of Maine, especially floating offshore wind is far greater than any other source with an estimated 156 gigawatts of energy available for conversion per year. To put that 156 gigawatt number in perspective that is more than 70 times the total amount of electricity used by the entire state of Maine in a year. The opportunity to produce such a large amount of clean renewable energy locally cannot be ignored and deserves full study. We understand that the build out of floating offshore wind, which is still an experimental technology would have impacts on both the environmental resource and the human use of the oceans. But we owe it to ourselves and to future manors to make every effort to meet our climate goals. That's why we are launching the series beginning last week with Dr. Habib Dogger from the University of Maine. We will be hosting two additional events on following Tuesdays and I hope you can join us for those. Next week on Tuesday April 6 at 1230pm we're hosting bat researcher Trevor Peterson from stand tech, as well as marine mammal experts to talk about offshore wind and the marine environment. Finally on April 13 at noon we'll be hosting Celia Cunningham the deputy deputy director of the governor's energy office to talk about the latest developments in the Gulf of Maine. Before we get started with our attendees I just want to remind you that we are on webinar format today, which means that we cannot see you or hear you just the panelists. If you have questions please put them down below in the Q&A box which is the two speech bubbles with the Q&A. And we're going to save all the questions for the end so we can make sure we get through our speakers today. And we are recording this it will be available on Maine Audubon's website probably either this afternoon or tomorrow. All right, let's get going today we are honored to be joined by two scientists working to understand and prevent turbine impacts to birds. Dr. Wing Goodale is the science director at the Biodiversity Research Institute, a main base organization which assesses emerging threats to wildlife and ecosystems through collaborative research and uses scientific findings to advance environmental awareness and informed decision makers. Welcome Wing Goodale. Dr. Roberto Albertani is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State. Dr. Albertani's research includes aerodynamics and stress analysis of flexible structures, high performance sailboat test testing techniques, fiber composites technology, micro air vehicles, biological flight mechanics, and most importantly for today's purposes, the environmental impact of wind energy. Welcome Dr. Albertani. Great, so I am going to without further ado turn it over to Dr. Goodale. Take it away. All right, great. So hopefully you can hear me and see my screen. We all good Nick. All right, great. So everyone really appreciate you joining us today, and I don't know if you've participated in some of the other webinars in Maine so I'm going to give a brief overview of what's going on on the East Coast, then put main in a context, discuss very briefly the negatives going on in Maine. Selena, Governor's Office will cover that more later in much greater detail in her presentation, and then focus mostly on what do we know about how birds respond to offshore wind. I'm going to move on to just give a little little background here and I'm sorry if some of this is review for some folks but I think it's very helpful to put the rapidly changing industry here in context. If some of you have seen onshore turbines they range in size of you know two and a half to 3.3 megawatts or so. You can see a picture of what those look like and to some degree in most locations so those turbines are limited in their size by some basic logistics of how you get large turbine components to the project site. Now with the offshore environment because turbines can be built basically at the edge of the shore and then taken via vessel to the site you can you're no longer constrained on the size of the turbines from a logistical standpoint. And because of that offshore wind turbines have been increasing significantly in size and in fact this this figure is you know already out of date these turbines are getting bigger and bigger by the day and we're now. There's discussions about turbines above 12 megawatts in size and what you're able to do with these larger turbines is we're able to get further offshore and reach into the greater wind resource. And so there's generally the sort of movement of getting further offshore and there are advantages to doing so from a production standpoint because generally speaking the further offshore you go the more wind there air there is and in some but certainly not all cases being further offshore starts to reduce conflicts. In different ways. So where's the wind this is a map that you may have seen already but it's just worth pointing out again is that a majority of the best wind in the United States is actually up in New England and in the Gulf of Maine. And that's why there's interest in the Gulf of Maine for offshore wind and it's up and down the East Coast as well. If you're keeping an eye to the news, there's a lot going on in the offshore wind world and yesterday, the Biden administration made a pretty significant announcement of a signaling strong support from the White House moving offshore wind forward, establishing 30 gigawatt by 30 goal. The vineyard wind final EIS has come out. So if you're interested in that you can check that out but there is a significant amount of movement forward to the south of us in the Gulf of Maine and offshore wind. There are eight leases, often Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and you can see vineyard wind there in the middle of that lease area and as we move down into New York. The blue area is owned by Equinor and that now has a power purchase agreement so that project has some real movement moving forward and one of the announcements. Let me go back actually one of the announcements that came out yesterday is those purple areas you can see there those are called call areas so those. This is in the center. Those are areas that are generally being considered for offshore wind with understanding that they need to be refined and something that came out yesterday was these areas starting to be refined and they will probably continue to be refined as we go forward. And then there are viable projects going all the way down to North Carolina right now and leases that are currently owned and moving forward in various ways. Further to the south these are more call areas and as far as I'm aware I don't think there are leases yet there. As you may remember from that wind map you're starting to get down into areas where the wind speed is not as high as up to the north. Just very briefly for what's going on in Maine there's a lot of different things that are going on. There was the Baldachi administration that was established to have a five gigawatt by 2030 goal for the Gulf of Maine that is not likely to be met, but that goal is out there and there's been various efforts through time to try to move towards that. Right now there's several things going on that's just worth knowing about. At the highest level there's interagency task force that's in sort of is nascent right now but we'll over the next five to probably seven years so it's going to be a longer process is a multi state effort to identify one of those are larger wind energy areas like we see to ourselves somewhere in the Gulf of Maine. So that's a federal state effort. Then we have the main offshore wind initiative. And this is comes from the state and from the Mills administration and sort of the key component of that moving forward right now is this roadmap effort and the roadmap effort is really looking at offshore wind from 360 degrees. Thinking through everything from supply chains to job creation to environmental considerations on how can the state best best approach this. There's been discussion I'm actually not sure its current status about a 10 year moratorium of offshore wind development in state water so that's out to three miles. Then there is the main researcher Ray and there's been various workshops ongoing about this and Selena I'm sure will provide more information about this and her talk. This is an effort by the state of Maine to identify a 16 square mile area within this area of interest you see here on the map. And there's an ongoing effort multi stakeholder effort right now to identify areas with least conflicts and the idea of this is going to be a project of, you know, approximately 10 turbines, and it will be set up so that there could be various research efforts to help understand specifically how floating off for when the main is influencing different resources and be able to use that in order to inform future projects. And then finally there's the main Aquaventus project which is off of Monhegan I'm sure you heard more about that last week from Dr. Dogger, and that's a one turbine project that is through a DOE initiative, and that is a demonstration project. And for those if you're interested if you just go to Google and type in Maine and offshore wind will take you to the main offshore wind website and here's a link to it can give you much more detail on what's going on. So what are the kind of the key components here of offshore wind we have the turbines we have cables that connect the electricity between the turbines and then eventually to a substation from that offshore substation we go from the cable to an onshore substation and then to the power line so on one hand there's sort of it's sort of fairly simple conceptually but each one of these components are areas that when we think about birds that we want to be aware of how these could birds interact with these different phases of our different portions of the projects. So what we have here in Maine is the traditional type of foundation that is used is a monopile or jacket foundation and this is essentially where you have, you know I sort of think of it of taking a nail and driving it into the sea floor and on top of that you put your, your lines, but in Maine our water is so deep and so quickly that we really are going to be looking towards floating types technology so semi submersible types designs like what University of Maine is working on that is anchored with catenary lines there's some other options of tension legs and spar buoys. What you're probably most interested in here is well what do we know about the effects of offshore wind birds and wildlife and I'm going to focus really here on birds but we're also dealing with an ecosystem so there's interaction that occur above water and below water. Probably what comes to mind for most folks is that there's a potential for collisions so this is where birds and bats can collide with the turbine blades themselves or the support structures. It's important to note that the actual number of fatalities that have been recorded offshore are very low is also important to note that as you may imagine this is a very hard and difficult thing in order to monitor successfully. There's also been some research in Europe and we'll get some more details on that on a certain set of birds are really have strong avoidance responses to turbines and that avoidance response can have two potential effects one is a potential displacement from a foraging area or was termed a barrier effect a basically a structure that the bird have to go around during migration or on their way to foraging areas. So below water and be expected that we're going to see some micro habitat changes so these new hard substrate that goes on the water is going to be a place for new benefit communities to develop and can be a place for fish aggregation so we're actually going to be seeing the habitat around the turbines and to some degree this is an area of open research of how will the birds respond to that habitat change. And there's also, this is really more about construction of traditional pile driven projects that there can be a lot of noise generated during that and those have the potential to affect marine mammals in particular, that's not my area of expertise and I want to note that floating projects will be the sort of the general thought is the turbines will primarily be constructed close to shore and then pulled out and anchored offshore so pile driving won't be a concern here in the Gulf of Maine. So I think one thing that's helpful is, at least for me, if you think of the sort of question of what are the impacts of offshore wind on birds, sort of big, that's a lot to digest and there's a real outcome and the basic risk approach that I think I found really helpful and it's looking at the risk in terms of hazards and vulnerability and exposure so hazards are you know what are the things that the birds are responding to so that's the physical turbines the wind farm itself vulnerability is so if the birds are present if they're exposed, are they going to be vulnerable to vulnerable to the offshore wind turbines. And as I already discussed a really kind of to kind of for adverse effects you want to consider both direct and indirect so indirect would be those displacement. So from a hazard perspective, you know, most of what we have learned about offshore wind comes from traditional pile driven turbines, that being said is probably the bird response the above water piece is probably relatively similar. So what are potential differences, there might be different type of reef effect that occurs. So that's the where fish might be attracted to the turbines there might be a different type of reef reef effect that occurs both here in the Gulf of Maine and also through a floating structure. Are there greater perching opportunities, and a really important note and we'll get into this and a little bit more is that a lot of what we've learned about avoidance comes from smaller turbines in Europe, and the turbines that would be considered here in the Gulf of Maine are going to be much larger in space much further apart. So how does that factor into avoidance behavior. Also here in the Gulf of Maine we need to consider the unique species assemblages that are here and also the unique geography of the area. So when we think about vulnerability to collision. These are difficult things to monitor offshore. And the way that researchers have approached this are sort of twofold one is directly trying to you actually detect collisions themselves, and Roberto is going to talk more about this and how to approach this. So this is an area of ongoing research and is a challenging area there's also been research around trying to understand what are the behaviors that make a species more or less vulnerable to collision so understanding flight heights and their flight speeds and basically also how many birds are going to be in an area and really importantly avoidance rates. Displacement is an area where there's actually been some very helpful studies that have given us an idea of which species are more likely to avoid projects and potentially be displaced by them. We talk about avoidance we we talk about in sort of three scales, we have macro which is a avoidance of the whole wind farm area meets so which is avoidance of individual turbines within a offshore wind farm, and then micro which are those last sort of moment avoidance responses that occur around the structure itself. So from a macro avoidance perspective, there's been some really seminal studies done in Europe of looking at loons and sea ducks in particular, and also ox and gannets that have looked at some pre construction work and post construction work with a before after gradient type design so that's where you're surveying a much larger area than the wind farm and you can look at how species distribution changes before and after and so you can see here from the macro avoidance work for loons and this is red throated loons the before and after of loon distribution with sort of that blue area being the concentrations and green areas being lower and you can see that loons really are not particularly interested in being near the offshore wind projects at all and in fact they can initiate avoidance response as far as 16.5 kilometers away and we've seen similar types of results for sea ducks. Looking like I'm kind of running low on time so I'm just going to sort of go through these last couple slides and then there'll certainly be opportunity for us to have conversation and ask questions in a bit. There's also some evidence to suggest for some species this idea of a barrier effects so during migration that the birds are going around. What's important to note for both displacement and barrier effect is that we have some pretty good idea of this response but what the potential impacts of that response remains a bit unclear on energetic consequences fitness consequences and ultimately will be a really good idea to get at. As we look at here at the Gulf of Maine. We have a really complex and dynamic ecosystem with some really unique qualities that we're both have southern and northern species we have listed species we have breeding seabirds here that aren't nesting to the south and we also have migratory birds and bats that are actually expected to be crossing. Across the the Gulf this this map here that we see here first is the MDAT maps of all species put together that shows you sort of overall higher and lower use areas that are predicted for 47 species. We also look to models developed from tracking data so this is northern Gannet in the fall and shows their higher and lower use areas as they're moving through this area during migration. More and more we're learning about how birds are crossing the Gulf and we now have pretty good information about falcons, songbirds, shorebirds and bats potentially moving across the Gulf and some of you may have seen this but I think it's a pretty interesting new finding that we, my colleague Krista Sorbo at BRI puts highlight transmitters on peregrine falcons and we track their migration across the Gulf of Maine and we can see them moving right through across the Gulf of Maine. As we start to consider the area of interest, we have a variety of useful tools from the Northeast data portal and this all comes from these bird distribution models that developed by NOAA and we can see varying use of the area by state listed species, species with higher collision or displacement risk and rosie turn which is certainly of particular interest because it is a listed species and I think with that I will finish up. Excellent. Thank you very much Dr. Goodell and we will turn it over to Dr. Albatani. Remember we are saving all our questions at the end. Please put them into the Q&A box below and I will stop talking so we can continue on. Thank you Dr. Alright, so I'm going to share my screen. Okay, so I hope that everybody can see my screen, the presentation. Well, thanks first to Maine Audubon, to Nick to organize this thing, a great presentation from Dr. Goodell was very interesting to know what's going on on the northeast coast. We in the northwest, Pacific Northwest, we are also active with offshore, with energy and wave energy, especially Oregon State. Anyway, I'm going to start right away, so this is just a brief outline. I'm going to cover a summary of two plus one project that have been funded with my team by the Department of Energy about detection of birds, a certain particular species that we will see applied to golden eagle or eagles and how to eventually deter them from getting too close to wind turbines. And finally, the main part of this project was how we can automatically detect events on blades, wind turbine, wind turbine blades. Very briefly, wind turbines are very machine that are quite large, and they could be with vertical axis shaft or horizontal axis shaft. The one on the sides of this slide are vertical shaft, the one in the middle is horizontal. So the shaft is spinning about the horizontal axis, which by the way now is the most popular and almost the only type of turbines that are out there, but just a brief perspective of history of engineering of wind turbines. There was a time that vertical shaft was popular and thought to be a good solution. Turbines are not almost never by running by themselves. They are organized in clusters or arrays or wind farms. These are just few pictures on a few arrays of wind farms. The turbines on the left, and I will talk about that particular turbine, turbine fuselage, is a GE 1.5 megawatt that is installed at the National Wind Technology Center, run by NREL, DOE, and we have used extensively the turbine for testing our systems. Very briefly, how the turbine works, there are these kind of gigantic blades converting kinetic energy from the wind to mechanical energy at the shaft. There are actually two shafts and there is a gearbox in between. There is the low speed shaft attached to the rotor. The main shaft runs through a gearbox. The gearbox multiplies the shaft speed, which is needed to run the electric generator. As far as a 2.5 typically, a typical wind turbine size now is about 2.5 megawatt. We have therefore a rotor diameter of about 100 meters. More important for our work, it means that the 50 or so meter long blade with the low speed rotor shaft spinning at about 18, 20 rounds per minute, it means that the tip of the blade runs at about 200 miles per hour, 225 miles per hour, which is 360 kilometers per hour. That's one of the main risk factors for birds and bats that are flying around. Those big blades that seem to run very, very slowly, they are indeed slow, but the velocity of the single section of the blade at the tip can be much higher than that. There is the, who in the world is producing most of energy. This is a 2015 slide data from DOE that was United States number one, second to second is China. I believe the now is reverse, but if we, this is the total production of single countries. If you look at the pro-capital production in 2012 data, Denmark was number one and followed by Spain, Portugal, and this is the anyway that the plot that showed the pro-capital, pro-capital production of wind energy. Where the wind energy is, I'm going to skip this slide because Dr. Goudel already gave a presentation about where the wind energy mainly is. Of course, this is the same or similar map from NREL that showed the potential of wind energy offshore and particularly the northeast coast of the United States, northwest, and of course there is the Tornado All in the center of the country, where it's not as high as offshore, but still is a high concentration of wind energy. So what is the motivation of our, my team work? We need to find out if blades are causing damages to birds or bats. On land, as probably most of you know, is the main way to understand and to do statistics is just look at carcasses on land, which already give some uncertainties due to scavengers. All these carcasses, if they are, they may disappear for just the weather or scavengers, and of course it's practically impossible to do the same methodology offshore. So there is no carcass count offshore. So how we can try to understand statistics on blade events? That's exactly one of the three steps that we are going to present in this work. The first part of our work, again funded by DOE, was specifically tailored to eagles. That was the main scope of the funding and everything that I will show about detecting a bird coming toward the turbine is focused on eagle. As I will explain in a few slides, the same system could be trained to detect and recognize and identify basically any other species of bird or bats. So the three step approach are target detection and identification, deterrent, and blade impact automatic monitoring. So having an automatic system that will tell us with a very high probability of detecting if the blade stroke some kind of object during the motion. How the overall system is organized around the turbine? Again, this system has been tested on the ground in the lab, on the ground, and on the GE 1.5 at the National Wind Technology Center. So we have a 360 degrees field of view single camera on top of the turbine. Basically, we have a field of view that is all the way around the turbine horizontally and 180 degrees vertically. There is one camera that look all the airspace around the turbine. And this is used for two things. First, and I will show a slide in a few minutes, a general understanding of the fly activity around the turbine. And then it will specifically be used to detect an eagle coming toward the turbine. Then we try to design a system that will deter or frighten eagle coming too close to the turbine, which is very difficult by the way to scare eagles away, but we try. And then finally there is the blade number three and number four. There is our detection on what's going on at the blade level, and I'll show in a few slides how we do that. Okay, so we have a single camera in the panel of the hand is a commercial weather proof 360 degrees camera installed on the top of the turbine. This camera will again view all the airspace around the turbine 360 degrees horizontally that's how that picture on the on the second arrow shows what is the view from the camera. Remember, we are looking at everything around us. On the right, there is the the an eagle a golden eagle that was specifically the the objective of this project that we have been using to train an algorithm that will number one recognize if there is a moving target in the sky. Number two is that moving target is coming towards and closer to the to the turbine and finally try to identify the species. How do you do that. Well, I'm not a special computer specialist I am out of space and in the outer space engineering all my life but I have colleagues at Oregon State that are specialists in image, image data processing and the recognition. They've been using algorithm that are a sort of artificial intelligence they are called deep convolutional neural network basically is a very complicated algorithm that is able to recognize things from and from others. What is the main fear that the main action that is algorithm need training and for this we went to the two locations. Oops. Two locations in our Oregon where we have where we have. Where there are golden eagles that have been saved in the past and being trained. So we've been flying those two golden eagles over and over and over, taking videos with the camera. That is on the top of the missile of the turbine. And this is just one example of the video with the eagle flying by the camera. Remember, this is a 360 degree so we are looking everything everywhere around us. But the next slide will give you an example on how the camera will look at the scene on top of the turbine. We of course never ever flew any bird train or not train closer or anywhere around the turbine so we flew golden eagles in the field in their own area to different area in Oregon, then we took videos. This is a sample of the videos on the top of the turbine and we match the two videos to train the algorithm to recognize things and more videos we have and more and better train the algorithm would be. Now we are assumed that the system works and we have indeed the 90 plus percent of true positive and the temp about 1015% of false positive and and 90 so percent of true net negative so we are assuming that we have a system that can recognize a bird coming is indeed an eagle. What we do then well there are several ways to avoid troubles with the bird coming around the turbine one typical way that we do not we have not a system that is shut down the turbine or put the turbine in a low energy mode so basically we spin slower or just shut down the turbine is not very desirable for several reasons like of course lots of lots of energy. So we put the blades and the raw and and the rotor. In a suck in a with more loads which is not exactly the best way so we we think we thought to study the feature that. was annoyed by anthropomorphic figures around the ground so we thought to use what we call kinetic kinetic deterrent which is basically those wind socks or wind dancers that you can maybe see typically on the outside the car dealer so we we have studied a system that can run several of these wind dancer with different colors colors were selected with the from another team sponsored by DOE to study the physiology of the eagle. So they suggested as colors that according to their study their research are the most annoying for eagles so we can run a certain number of kinetic deterrent on on on the ground. We did a lot of tests in the wind tunnel at OSU on the on the van just to see how they these wind, these deterrent reacts with wind, and we can run a number of them in random way, and this will be these are run automatically by the computer system when the camera and the camera go in the tech that we the an eagle is coming automatically the system we start to run all these these deterrents on on the ground. We file a scientific collect collection permit with the Oregon wildlife and Cali and Idaho wildlife. So we did some to test campaign or these deterrents in the present of wild eagle with all the permit and everything we were just not harming the body with just where we just deploy one or two that the deterrent when the wild eagle were flying around we have sort of relatively positive results but in the end after to the deployment in two different the same are in Oregon in the two different time of the year we really could not tell that it was not enough data not enough test not enough encounter to really tell if the deterrent will make a difference. So we have now a system that can identify a species coming specifically an eagle, we could have a system with the, the, the, the deterrent, but the, the, the core of the, or the problem is okay, whatever system you have to deter or whatever system you have try to avoid impact like shut down or whatever other idea you have to look at interactions between birds bats and Thorbine, what is the real effective effective result of that so we need something that will that will detect if the blade had any impact with with with something. So we, we had the idea to use the vibrations on blades vibration that will be induced by an impact of the blade on something. So of course, vibration runs along a solid. The blade is a solid and because it's a fiberglass with some carbon fiber inside for the last blade but mainly fiberglass the fibers conduct vibrations very very well. So we put some sensors at the root of each blade, the sensor will monitor continuously for vibrations on the blades and with other specialized algorithm. We will be able in real time to detect if there was a spike in vibration that probably was due to an impact on the blade. So vibrations are the key measurement for us. The spike in vibration will activate automatically a micro camera that is on the same sensor that is that is a picture on the bottom right the the all these sensors are in a box the box as also a micro camera looking at the leading edge of the blade like the picture on the on the top right. So, and the camera continuously monitor the blade, but only when only when there is a strike detected by the sensor will tell to the camera to the computer to save a certain number of frames of the video before and after the impact. Those frames like the one at the bottom right is a frame automatically saved when the the blade at the GE 1.5 in Boulder Colorado at the National Wind Technology Center at the strike with a tennis ball. Why tennis ball. Well, because we need it. We need some way to to to simulate birth impact on the blade. So my students had a really, really fun. I had the fun to to design a Canon, a compressed Canon or cutting is called potato launcher or potato gun or something like that. So with that Canon, we were shooting tennis balls and small potatoes toward the rotor and we had a certain number of events and the graph on the bottom left shows an example of the vibration the continuous vibration recorded by the system because blades are continuously affected by vibration for the normal turbine operation. But when there is a strike there is a spike in the vibration and again we detect automatically that spike and the camera on board this is a just a recording this by the way is another GE 1.5 at the at the community college in New Mexico that we also use for testing. So the camera is continually looking at the blade like the video there, but only when the strike is detected the images will be saved for species recognition and event confirmation. So species recognition is fundamentally important of course for in our system. Moreover, for specifically for night births and baths, we are right now is a new project experimenting and we think that we will be able to deploy this new system in the mid-May again in Boulder, Colorado, we will have a high resolution infrared camera mounted on the rotor blade that will operate similarly to the daylight camera, but specifically for nocturnal vision. And finally, the same 360 camera that is on top of the NACER will also be used as a general general, higher space, general surveillance around wind turbines. And with this I think I conclude my presentation with this Eagle Detection, the Terrain System and more important, Blade Event Automatic Detection System. And with this I think I can close my talk and open for questions. Excellent. Thank you so much Dr. Albertani. Thank you so much Dr. Goodell. Let's take some questions now and I would like to invite my colleague Eliza Donahue if she would like to be on for this section in case there are questions about Maine Audubon. Let's just dive into it. First, Dr. Goodell, if I could ask you to talk a little bit more about what's known about the threats to migratory, say, passerines, smaller simbers and things over the Gulf, are they what do we know maybe about the heights that they fly or the sort of the threat that turbines may pose in the Gulf? Yeah, great question. So thinking back to that sort of simple risk matrix, the couple of things we want to consider first is so exposure, when are the birds out there and how are they out there? And we certainly know that some species like black pole warblers are going to leave the Gulf of Maine, the coast of Maine over the Gulf of Maine and fly south down to the Caribbean and areas down there. Other species may be making those kind of jumps across the Gulf that we saw with like the Peregrine Falcon map that I showed. So we certainly know that the species are out there. How are they differentiating their use across the entire Gulf? Are they using some areas more than others? I'd say that's an area that we don't have a lot of information. I think the assumption is that there's going to be greater use for some species closer to shore, but you will get those sort of cutoffs going across the Gulf. As some of you may know that there's different ways to track wildlife and learn about them. And songbirds are so small that we can't put satellite transmitters on them that give you that detailed information. But there's been some really interesting work with a kind of technology called MODIS tags or nano tags. There's these tiny little VHF transmitters that we can put on the birds. And their signal gets picked up by receiver stations that are set up around the Gulf of Maine. And there's been research on songbirds that's gone up and down through time. Starting actually over on Nova Scotia and down through the Gulf of Maine. So we have a sense of that the birds are moving around. One interesting thing though, we think of migration in our head as this sort of directional continual movement of birds just, hey, they're all heading south. But some of the things that we've learned in this nano tag work is that the birds do all sorts of weird things, right? So another way that we can learn about their use offshore is weather radar or next rad radar. If any of you have checked out unfiltered next rad radar on a evening when there is in September and there's a cold front after a rainy period, it's pretty amazing to see what looks like this eruption of like thunderstorms along the coast of Maine. And that's where we're seeing songbirds starting to move offshore. So we do have some general understanding of their movement offshore. So to the question of flight heights, that's a hard one. There's some radar work that was done on Monhegan in which we saw differential use through the air column of songbird use, but that's likely to be different offshore. And, you know, Adrian Laphole of the IF&W is considering this a lot. One thing she thinks about is how the birds are ascending and descending from the islands. So the further that you get from shore, the assumption is that the birds are getting higher. So they're going up. And their altitude of flight is going to be relative to the weather. So in those sort of traditional cold fronts, the assumption is the birds are probably getting pretty high. They're getting up there and they're cooking along. The areas of concern happen when those birds have been hunkered down for a while because of poor weather. They're heading out. And then another system comes in that pushes them down. So they're going to, as a cloud cover comes in, they're going to be becoming lower. How does that put them at risk is, you know, remains an open question offshore, but certainly one of the important things is reducing lighting. So, you know, these birds evolved to navigate using a variety of cues, but they certainly evolved with having only the moon and stars as lighting out there. And so when there's, and there's many records that there are lighthouses of migrants being attracted to lighthouses. So large white lights are not good at all. And some of the work in Germany, Athena once saw a lot of attraction of some songbirds to an area that was really lit up. So we're able to really minimize those potential effects by reducing lighting at the turbine themselves. And the good news is that the traditional FAA lighting that is flashing reds are lights that the birds are attracted to us. And that's probably more than you wanted, but I will. That's fantastic. That's really important. Dr. Albert I have a question here from Sally about, do you think your detection cameras can catch smaller birds or how do you see, you know, use a tennis ball in the test which was interesting. And how do you think that those land based tests might transfer to offshore sites. Thank you for the questions. Cameras can, we are now experimenting cameras with higher resolution. And of course, you know, the, the evolution of electronic so fast that the answer is yes, I think we can definitely catch any size of birds actually just by using the camera maybe we are now using more than one camera with different resolution and field field of view. Problem is camera supposed to be triggered by the spike of the of the of the event and the smaller the bird or the lower kinetic energy or the lower speed of the blade, the spikes going to be lower and lower. And the, the, the ultimate solution would probably be having the camera running continuously, which again with the model with the evolution of electronic we can compress the data. So definitely small birds and small bats. Yes. And could be also using nighttime with infrared cameras. And we don't think there will be much difference between land and offshore for all these systems will be just a difference in the in in environmental conditions but I don't think there will be any any fundamental difference in the systems. Question, more of a general question I think for Dr good else. As we are moving forward with, you know, research turbines in the Gulf and a researcher Ray coming up. Do you think that we will know what we need to know. In other words, do you think that the, what do what what should the turbines or what should scientists make sure we look at as we are entering these research and test phases. To make sure that we are accurately understanding the impacts of birds and then eliminating them, mitigating them, etc. A great question. A long conversation, but some, there's certain things that we can learn without structures out there through surveys and some of this, some types of tracking. But for some species, we really need structures out there in order to affix various sensor equipment to them. And so I think that's sort of two helpful ways to think about this what can we learn in the absence of structures and what can we learn with structures in place and then the absence of structures we can get a baseline understanding of what birds are out there when through sort of traditional survey methodologies and that's very helpful and in the Gulf of Maine. We really don't have recent information on this, and this is an important thing that we collectively need to do in this space is to get new baseline data we have a hodgepodge of data from 1978 to present through the Gulf of Maine but it's and that's what's been used in these predictive maps, the MDAT maps that are available on the portal so that's helpful predictive models are helpful but we really don't have recent information here. So number one, we've got to get the baseline surveys. So secondly, then the question is what what can we learn from a research array. And I think it's helpful to think about that first in a technology monitoring technology testing phase. So taking the kind of technology that we heard from from Roberto and thinking, can we test that out on a research array in the same way that NREL allows access to turbines that kind of access is not necessarily even possible in a commercial scale project so having access to test different technologies being able to manipulate the turbines themselves attach things to it all sorts of things that are just not going to be that feasible and commercial project so that's number one. Number two having technology out there so that we can learn about say what the activity of nocturnal migrants offshore. Obviously, when you're doing basic survey work you're doing that during daylight hours and getting information on those nocturnal migrants is not really possible so having sensor technology out there some of the nanotags that we talked about is really and then maybe the last piece to consider is sort of the ecological side is considering the relationship between what's going on underwater and above water and having interdisciplinary studies that help us understand that relationship because one of the tricky things with anything like this is that you can do your best to predict what's going to happen, but you're putting a novel structure in the water and that's going to change what's happening out there and it's going to change how wildlife are responding so. And then we have unique species a unique situation here in the Gulf of Maine and we need to use the research array in order to learn on these initial turbines, how wildlife responding so that as you move forward to more commercial scale projects that you can take what's been done such as things like spacing as you change spacing does that allow for quarters and movement for birds between the turbines and starts to reduce this concern about displacement and how to tell us. Thank you very much. Dr Albertani a couple other questions about detection or avoidance possibilities out there. One is that the possibility of using sound to potentially cause avoidance and and another one is, is there an option for potential avoidance measures that are sort of running continuously not maybe waiting for an event or or birds to come near. All right. Thank you again for the questions sound. Yes and no. Our work and I am an engineer not biology so I just read the things about the turning for birds and it turned out that sound will not work for eagle. And again I say go because that was the specific objective of our study sound may work for other birds is actually there is a very famous I learned company in Oregon close by where we are here. That is a specific that is specialized making sound the turn and for bird that seems to be very successful with certain bird species for crops, protecting crops and other things so sound for certain species I understand is certainly a possibility. Of course we need to think about the scale wind farms and wind turbines are so vast and so large that generating enough sound for those big large areas. I don't could be a little kind of child child challenging. So sound I would say yes and no running continuously the monitoring. Yes, is certainly a possibility, but running videos for each blade continuously generates a enormous amount of data, and there will be problematic to process or to store those data for a continuous monitoring. As I mentioned with the improving technology of memory and the algorithm that will compress the data, it could probably be an option instead of activate the video only when an event is detected so yes it's probably a possibility in the near future to have a continuous running video. Thank you. So I'm aware of the time here and I want to take just one more question I, I urge you if you have additional questions to email them to me. I can put my email in the chat. Because there are a lot more questions the other things I will say and my lights are flickering for some reason. So there are some questions here about other things that can be done in the Gulf or other measures that are taken. I encourage you to register for the additional presentations in our series so next week we have presentation on benefit communities and marine mammals. I want to talk a little bit more about what happens under water and under, you know, on the, on the subsurface. And then finally, the governor's energy office, silly Cunningham is joining us on April 13. And that's a great time to ask questions about, you know, other things can be that we will learn from the research array and how we make sure we are we are researching those things and asking the right questions. Please join there you can just go to main Audubon and register for those programs and we'd love to have you. I just I guess I want to ask one last question for for Dr. Goodale which is about what about birds diving under water. Is there any potential threat there and our other understanding. Yeah great question I want to just follow up in the deterrent question to very quickly and please please. Birds are really smart, they habituate quickly. And, you know, I think one of the, the great things about Roberto is showing is having novel things that shock the birds so that they see something new and response if you have things running continuously the birds are more particularly birds like gulls are very smart and they're going to become accustomed to it. And also more anecdotal I heard that you know this is a real issue at airports right. And I heard a whole variety of methods. You know, I think it was a Navy they spent a ton of money on this and what they found out was the best deterrent was to have somebody walk with their little terrier around the periphery of the airport, every so often. And that was more effective than any light show or sounds or anything else at deterring birds. So that sort of that predator out there is what helps so I'm sorry Nick what was your, what was the question underwater birds diving birds, right. You know, I think that a lot of the birds that are diving birds, some of them are the ones that avoid projects so your, your seed ox, your gannets, your ox, our species that tend to avoid something that has started to show up in European countries is seed ox will initially avoid projects, but then as the new new food resource becomes available to them they can be attracted in and potentially be foraging on muscles that are available. Now the base of the turbines. So I think this is like one area if we think about the research array is understanding how things change through time and how birds are going to respond to that through time it's, you're not. To do a study just in the first several years is going to be very helpful but one thing that the research array can allow for is longer term studies and look at how changes of that ecology around those turbines are going to affect foraging opportunities for the birds. During construction for traditional pile driven, you know the sound attenuation, probably what's going to happen is the birds will avoid the area, as will pray. So they're probably going to avoid that potential hazard. So that's a great area for continued research as we go forward. There is much to learn. Thank you very much to both Dr Albertani Dr Goodell for your presentations today or really appreciate your time and the work that you are doing. Everyone thanks for joining. It's great to have you on this video will be available on our website soon and please join us for our two following presentations. Thanks again to our presenters and have a great day everyone. Thank you.