Objectives of the service
Offshore wind developers and environmental monitoring teams need better ways to understand how marine life uses offshore structures over time. Existing surveys are often periodic, vessel-dependent and provide only limited temporal coverage, making it difficult to capture seasonal patterns, day–night variation, juvenile fish use and the ecological value of structures such as scour protection.
SatSeaBio provides long-term, non-invasive biodiversity monitoring using stereo underwater cameras deployed from an autonomous buoy or integrated into another offshore platform. Onboard processing and remote communication allow relevant observations to be collected over extended periods and made available for biodiversity analysis on shore.
During the European Space Agency-supported activity, Anemo Robotics worked with offshore wind developers, consultancies and technical partners to refine user requirements, define the system and service architecture, assess power and communication needs, test data-reduction workflows, develop the commercial delivery model and prepare the next-stage offshore demonstration.
Users and their needs
The primary users of SatSeaBio are offshore wind developers, owners and operators who need to understand biodiversity around offshore infrastructure throughout construction, operation and decommissioning. Environmental consultancies and monitoring providers are an additional user group, integrating biodiversity information into wider environmental monitoring programmes.
These users need reliable information on how marine life uses offshore sites over time, including species occurrence and abundance, seasonal and day–night patterns, size distributions, juvenile fish and habitat use. Of particular interest are questions that are difficult to answer through short survey campaigns, such as the ecological role of scour protection and other offshore structures, and how these habitats should be considered during decommissioning.
Users also need monitoring approaches that reduce offshore effort, can operate for extended periods at remote sites and provide processed, reviewable information rather than large volumes of raw video.
Service/ system concept
SatSeaBio combines an underwater stereo-camera system with an autonomous offshore platform and a shore-based biodiversity data service. The camera package can be deployed from a buoy or integrated into another suitable offshore platform, allowing repeated observations of marine life over extended periods.
At sea, video is stored locally and processed onboard to identify relevant observations. Instead of transmitting all recorded footage, selected video clips, detections, metadata and information on system performance can be sent to shore through mobile or satellite communication. This reduces communication requirements while retaining the full-resolution recordings for further analysis.
On shore, Anemo Robotics processes and quality-checks the observations and can combine them with relevant environmental information. The resulting outputs include species occurrence and abundance, size distributions, biomass-related estimates where suitable, and patterns over time. These are delivered as processed data, reports or dashboard outputs that can be used directly in environmental monitoring and assessment.
Space Added Value
Satellite communication enables SatSeaBio to transmit selected biodiversity observations from remote offshore locations where cellular or fixed communication infrastructure is unavailable. Earth Observation provides complementary environmental context, particularly sea-surface temperature and chlorophyll information, while GNSS supports positioning and time reference. Combined with an autonomous host platform providing power, these space-enabled capabilities support long-term monitoring at remote offshore sites.
Current Status
SatSeaBio has progressed from an initial concept to a defined autonomous monitoring system and service. Two data-reduction tests demonstrated that transmitting selected detection-based video snippets instead of the corresponding full video can reduce the data volume requiring remote transmission by more than 99.8%. A 12-month energy model has been developed for a representative autonomous monitoring station, and a candidate host platform has already operated at sea while powering an underwater camera.
Customer and partner engagement has also progressed substantially. A technology partner specialised in underwater acoustics has signed a Letter of Intent for technical cooperation, while a leading offshore wind developer has provided a non-binding Letter of Intent confirming interest in long-duration SatSeaBio monitoring, including decommissioning, nursery-habitat assessment and full-season technology validation. With a second major offshore wind developer, a concept has been developed for a three-station SatSeaBio demonstration at an operational offshore wind farm in the German North Sea, supported by a formal Letter of Support.
The next step is to integrate and validate the complete SatSeaBio system during an extended offshore deployment.
