Empire Wind and Wildlife Conservation Society extend acoustic marine monitoring project in New York Bight
Empire Wind and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) have extended to 2028 their agreement to monitor large whales in the lease area of Empire Wind, an offshore wind project located in the New York Bight off the southern coast of Long Island.
The acoustic monitoring agreement is between Empire Wind, a joint venture between Equinor and bp, and the WCS with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which invented and operates the buoys.
The agreement ensures that important data to protect wildlife in the New York Bight will be collected during the pre-construction, construction and post-construction phases of the wind project.
Two deployed moored acoustic monitoring buoys located in the New York Bight within the Empire Wind lease area have already compiled more than 2,000 days of monitoring data and have detected more than 18,000 whale sounds in near real time.
The two buoys use WHOI-developed near-real-time passive acoustic monitoring (NRT PAM) technology that detects the distinct sounds of different whale species. Data collected will result in considerable new knowledge on whale occurrence and behaviour in and around the Empire Wind lease area. The sounds that are detected and recorded by the buoys to date came from four large whale species: fin, humpback, sei, and North Atlantic right whales.
“This ongoing collaboration provides invaluable data on how these whales are using the New York Bight. In turn, this data can be used to inform best practices to minimise impacts on wildlife from the development of offshore wind energy,” said Dr. Howard C. Rosenbaum, Director of WCS’s Ocean Giants Program.
