Many marine developments, including offshore wind, are required to collect a huge amount of survey data during the lifetime of their project. A lot of this data is collected to fulfil monitoring requirements that are agreed as part of a project’s marine licence. These requirements are in place to ensure that the environmental impacts of the development are in line with what was predicted, and to identify any unexpected impacts. The data collected during these surveys could also have significant value beyond fulfilling monitoring requirements, and could be used in academic research, marine planning, or to support future consent applications.
However, much of the data is currently difficult to find, and stakeholders have consistently said we could be getting more value out of the data that we collect. The Marine Management Organisation’s (MMO’s) Strategic Renewables Unit (SRU) and Marine Licensing Team have therefore been working to improve the accessibility of monitoring reports and data, in particular to improve the sharing of data between the MMO and The Crown Estate’s Marine Data Exchange, which provides an accessible platform for finding and accessing marine data.
We hope that this work will ensure monitoring data becomes easier to access and more widely used. In turn, this will improve our understanding of the marine environment and the impacts of development and reduce uncertainty in planning and decision-making.
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