PREDICT

PREDICT is an ambitious three-year project funded by Ørsted, the global leader in offshore wind, and a collaboration between the University of Aberdeen and Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at the University of the Highlands and Islands that aims to address knowledge gaps in offshore wind environmental characterisation by improving understanding of fish migration patterns and providing a vision for next-generation monitoring techniques.

The project brings together a diverse team of expertise from academia and industry spanning a range of multi-disciplinary research disciplines including ecology, engineering, and data analysis, to investigate fish migration patterns as prey availability to better predict the locations and seasons where top-level predators (seabirds and mammals) may have increased interaction with windfarms. PREDICT will also look at how climate change may impact predictions of oceanographic changes to productive regions in time and space that may drive as well as use methodologies to assess the knock-on effects on seabird and marine mammals.

The project will support building the evidence base of strategic prediction, survey and analysis methods, and help to increase confidence in developing and consenting offshore wind arrays. Outputs of the project will enable the industry to avoid using locations that have a higher likelihood of overlap with important feeding grounds for seabird and marine mammals for offshore wind developments now and into the future.