Developing Standard Approaches to Synthesizing, Visualizing, and Disseminating High-resolution Geophysical and Imagery Data to Advance Benthic Habitat Mapping for Offshore Wind in the Northeast
July 2021 Project Status Update
Period of performance: November 2020 – February 2022
Partners: INSPIRE Environmental
Funding: Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management
Summary: INSPIRE Environmental and the Northeast Regional Ocean Council are working together to develop standard approaches to synthesizing, visualizing, and disseminating high-resolution acoustic and imagery data to advance benthic habitat mapping in the wind energy areas of the Northeast. This project will develop best practices for:
- integrating acoustic data and high-resolution imagery to map benthic habitats; and
- making those habitat data available to federal and state regulators and stakeholders in a vetted and established forum, the Northeast Ocean Data Portal
INSPIRE will collaborate with NROC to ensure that these habitat data products are compatible with existing mapping standards. NROC will convene a Seafloor Habitat Data Work Group to elicit input regarding specific benthic habitat mapping needs as well as coordinating review and vetting by stakeholders of the developed habitat data products.
Outputs:
- Standard data request for a set of specific habitat data products relative to site characterization
- Improved understanding of habitat distributions across the region
- Use Northeast Ocean Data Portal to disseminate standard set of intermediate scale regional habitat composites that improve upon current region-scale data; possibly pilot a system to provide password-protected access to higher resolution underlying data
Seafloor Habitat Data Work Group
Purpose
- One response to recommendations made over the last several years by the NROC Ocean Planning Committee
- Complementary to the NROC Habitat Classification and Ocean Mapping (HCOM) Subcommittee
- Will inform a pilot project to use high- resolution seafloor habitat data (e.g., acoustic data and seafloor imagery) collected by the offshore wind industry to improve existing regional-scale seafloor habitat data products that vary in age, coverage, and scale.
- Methods/approaches can be transferred to high-resolution seafloor habitat data from other sources and for other uses
Members
- Expertise in:
- Offshore wind regulatory processes
- Synthesis and classification of seafloor acoustic data and seafloor imagery
- Development of interactive data exploration or analysis tools
- Development of infographics and documentation, including metadata
- From variety of organizations: offshore energy developers, federal and state agencies