To celebrate 40 years since the world famous Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) was established, Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems have today released their latest edition, but this edition is extra special as it honours SMRU’s 40th anniversary by only including manuscripts from work led by researchers at SMRU. The journal has manuscripts covering SMRU’s investigations of many [...]
SMRU Consulting has been monitoring marine mammals around marine renewable energy projects since 2006. Our experience includes the SeaGen device in Northern Ireland at (the world’s first grid connected tidal turbine), the DeltaStream device in Wales, the MeyGen array in northern Scotland (the world’s largest planned tidal turbine project), and since 2009, in the upper Bay [...]
SMRU Consulting are delighted to announce the release of our latest Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) commissioned report – a review of noise abatement systems (NAS) for offshore wind farm (OWF) construction noise, and the potential for their application in Scottish waters. […]
An exciting, comprehensive and important piece of work on underwater noise and its effects on marine mammals has just been published – Brandon Southall and colleagues have updated their 2007 publication in Aquatic Mammals, congratulations Brandon and team! […]
The objective of this project was to determine the most appropriate approach, by full consideration of pros and cons, to year-round monitoring of harbour porpoise at the candidate Special Area of Conservation (cSAC) and wider southern North Sea and to subsequently design a sampling plan to monitor the site to inform assessments of site condition and [...]
On behalf of our co-authors from Akvaplan-niva, British Antarctic Survey, CREEM, NORUT, Seiche Ltd and SMRU, we are pleased to announce our latest (open access) publication in Marine Pollution Bulletin “A review of unmanned vehicles for the detection and monitoring of marine fauna” […]
SMRU Consulting are excited to present a new publication on the seal tagging studies carried out at the world’s first commercial scale tidal turbine, SeaGen, at Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland. […]
Though commonly encountered in continental shelf waters in the North Atlantic little is known about harbour porpoise movement patterns outside coastal waters. However, a recent study of Greenland harbour porpoises reveals long-range oceanic movements and deep diving as well as strongly seasonal coastal site fidelity. […]
Ursula will be presenting tomorrow (15th June) on Low Visibility Monitoring at the workshop on The Effect of Seismic Surveys on the Marine Environment at the European Association of the Geoscientists & Engineers Conference & Exhibition. […]
We wanted to highlight to everyone the release of an exciting new paper which presents the predicted impacts on the harbour porpoise population as a result of the construction of 65 offshore wind farms in the North Sea, using the ‘Disturbance Effect on the Harbour Porpoise in the North Sea’ (DEPONS) model. […]
Announcing the release of an exciting new paper linking maternal body size and condition during lactation to calf growth rates in southern right whales, using drones! […]
By Chloe Malinka We’d like to let you know about a new publication, authored by researchers from SMRU Consulting, the Sea Mammal Research Unit, and a couple of PAMGuard programmers. Our paper presents findings from the first in-situ passive acoustic monitoring array for marine mammals at an operational tidal turbine in Ramsey Sound, Wales, UK. This post [...]
Over the last two years, there’s been a very interesting exploration of how successfully harbour porpoises forage and what the implications are for their vulnerability or ability to tolerate disturbance. Here we’re going to take a bit of a ‘deep dive’ to explore what it all means. […]
We’re excited to see two new papers published in Aquatic Mammals journal, furthering our knowledge of porpoise health, energetics and the effects of exposure to pile-driving noise. […]
Given our projects in the North Sea and our work on Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and with the development of the iPCoD framework, we’re always particularly interested when new research comes to light on how porpoises respond to noise. Today is one such day of interest! […]
Collaborative research conducted by the SMRU Asia Pacific team was recently published as the Editors Choice in the ICES Journal of Marine Science (IJMS). The research described how the noises made by chorusing fish can help identify the foraging habitat of the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin (Sousa chinensis) in the Pearl River Estuary, southern China. […]
A really interesting study from our colleagues at the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, and TNO has explored how effective the sonar mitigation known as ‘ramp-up’ is for humpback whales. […]
Having a British base for SMRU Consulting Europe means some of us are a bit preoccupied with the weather. And sometimes it even affects our jobs. Visually detecting animals in low visibility conditions can be challenging – and that affects our ability to monitor populations and mitigate impacts. So how do we improve detection performance in [...]
New publication now available: Tollit, D.J., L. Fritz, R. Joy, K. Miller, A. Schulze, J. Thomason, W. Walker, T. Zeppelin, T.S. Gelatt (2017). Diet of endangered Steller sea lions in the Aleutian Islands: New insights from DNA detections and bio-energetic reconstructions. Canadian Journal of Zoology 95(11): 853–868, year 2017, doi: 10.1139/cjz-2016-0253. The western stock of Steller [...]
We are pleased to announce the release of our report “Guide to Population Models used in Marine Mammal Impact Assessment” produced for JNCC in collaboration with Dave Thompson at SMRU. […]
