The Collision Risk Data Collection (CRDC) task aims to reduce data accumulation during field campaign deployments to observe animal interactions with current energy converters or turbines. Most data collection efforts use existing commercial technologies, like echosounders, video cameras, and high-resolution multibeam echosounders (typically referred to as acoustic cameras) to observe animal interactions with moving devices. Often data collection occurs over days and weeks and consists of low-value footage when no animals are near a turbine. Removing or archiving these data is necessary to reduce time and cost associated with expensive human review efforts. The objective of CRDC is to leverage commercially available sensors and create a way to only archive data of interest, for instance animals near a turbine. Developing software that uses signal triggers from upstream echosounders to store downstream video or acoustic camera data when animals are present will minimize data storage needs while reducing labor for analyses. 

The Collision Risk Data Processing (CRDP) task has similar objectives to the CRDC task, which is to reduce time and cost for expensive human review efforts. However, CRDP is designed to improve the processing efficiency of the large volumes of gathered data. The task aims to reduce acoustic camera datasets into subsets of interest, e.g., when animals are interacting with turbines, so analyses can focus on the most valuable and relevant data. This reduction is done using data processing algorithms that remove times when animals are absent and archives those when animals are present. This research will decrease the cost and effort to more efficiently indicate the possible collision risk of animals with turbines, thus allowing developers to test and monitor their devices more effectively.  

Read the report.