INSITE North Sea

Anthropogenic structures are deployed in marine environments to support industrial activities such as energy production. Sessile marine organisms rapidly colonise these offshore structures, which in turn attract mobile invertebrates, fish and top predators.

Anthropogenic structures are deployed in marine environments to support industrial activities such as energy production. Sessile marine organisms rapidly colonise these offshore structures, which in turn attract mobile invertebrates, fish and top predators.

These ‘artificial reef’ communities deliver ecosystem services, including water filtration, carbon sequestration and fisheries. Whilst colonisation of structures has been studied at local scales, but the role of artificial reefs in regional processes and ecosystems, where structures may constitute a significant proportion of total hard substrata, remains poorly understood.

The increasing number of man-made structures in marine ecosystems, termed ‘ocean sprawl’, may have profound effects on ecosystem processes including the consumption and production of plankton and the spatial distribution of fish, mammals and birds. Understanding these ecosystem-scale effects is an urgent priority for research. 

The benthos, including animals and plants (marine growth) growing on man-made structures (MMS), plays a pivotal role driving productivity in marine systems. In order to better understand this role, and the influence MMS, across complete ecosystems (e.g. North Sea) we need to both identify organisms, and quantify their biomass, rapidly and accurately.

Until now, obtaining data on the biomass and identity of taxa associated with offshore structures has been limited by the time and cost constraints of conducting ecological surveys at the necessary spatial scales. However, all offshore energy operators routinely use remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to collect infrastructure videos for maintenance purposes. The value of this footage, collected over wide spatial and temporal scales, has been recognised for biodiversity assessments, and industry videos have been used to identify associations between infrastructure and commercially-exploited and protected species. In contrast, this video footage has yet to be used to quantify biomass, because bio-volume and taxon-specific density estimates are required to calculate biomass.

The objectives of the NS3D project are described below: