Greentech South Award
We’re really excited to have been awarded funding from Greentech South to kickstart the first stage of the MARLIN project at RS Aqua.
Being the UK’s pioneer ESCA accredited cleantech network, Greentech South plays a strong role in facilitating innovation.
It achieves this by offering award funding for SME businesses with concrete concepts aimed at revolutionising commercial products and services, resulting in a significant reduction of carbon emissions, as we move towards a zero-carbon economy.
As part of the Low-Carbon Solent support project ran by Greentech South, we’ve been awarded funding to help cover the costs of our latest technology advancements on Project MARLIN.
About Project MARLIN
Project MARLIN aims to develop a noise sensor system to monitor the underwater environment. Collaborating with the University of Southampton, MARLIN will use machine learning for the detection of damaging environmental activities.
Information is relayed in real time to a web app allowing MARLIN users to engage in remote, real-time monitoring of the underwater ecosystem and facilitating instant decision-making – a groundbreaking advancement in this capability.
Project MARLIN will improve the monitoring of marine mammals during offshore windfarm construction, reducing costs for windfarm operators, and help detect illegal fishing in marine protected areas (MPAS). In both cases MARLIN will decrease CO2 emissions dramatically by reducing the need for offshore vessel time.
Winning the Greentech South grant has allowed for us to start the research and development of Project MARLIN sooner than originally imagined – bringing our timeline forward by a few months.
Our First Steps
To develop the underwater noise sensor system for Project MARLIN, we first need to gather baseline data about what the underwater world sounds like at multiple locations around the UK.
Our technical team have deployed a seabed lander carrying one of our Porpoise underwater noise recorders six miles off the coast of Littlehampton, West Sussex. The funding from Greentech South has funded the costs of this deployment.
The lander has been deployed now for a little over two months and is due to be recovered shortly. Once recovered, our technical team will be able to offload the data for analysis, service the system, and place the lander back in the water for further recording.
RS Aqua Lander
The Next Steps
In 6 months’, time we will start to deploy additional landers at five other locations around the UK. The data will give us good baseline data on the UK’s underwater soundscape.
“The Greentech South grant has been instrumental to our R&D plans in 2023 and has enabled us to gather ground breaking data on the UK’s underwater soundscape.” Says Ryan Mowat, Director of Fisheries and Research at RS Aqua. “This data is crucial to our work developing a revolutionary technology for monitoring our underwater environment in real time and help reduce the carbon footprint of ocean monitoring.”