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Impulsive noise in the Southern North Sea SAC and other harbour porpoise SACs (2022–2024) 2024

Abstract

Guidance from Statutory Nature Conservation Bodies (SNCBs) (JNCC 2020) advises on the use of spatio-temporal thresholds for activities resulting in impulsive noise, such as seismic surveys, some sub-bottom profiling equipment, impact pile driving and explosives, to minimise disturbance in harbour porpoise Special Areas of Conservation (SACs). To assist with the management of noise and assess the effectiveness of the guidance, the UK Marine Noise Registry (MNR) helps monitor the occurrence of noisy events and understand their distribution, patterns, and potential for disturbance.

Activities’ close out data (e.g. noise sources, location and dates) are submitted to the MNR, enabling retrospective analysis of the potential disturbance footprints. In this report, the prevalence of noise events, their distribution in time and space and the contribution of the different activities to the overall disturbance footprint are investigated, for all harbour porpoise SACs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, in the winter of 2022–2023, the summer of 2023, and the winter of 2023–2024. More detail is provided for the Southern North Sea (SNS) SAC since this had by far the highest levels of noisy activity. However, the daily 20% and the seasonal average 10% thresholds were not exceeded in the SNS SAC in any of the three seasons.

The data are presented in the context of the SNCB guidance with the intent to illustrate the kind of outputs from MNR data that would be of interest to regulators and their advisors, industry and their consultants when checking for compliance retrospectively or when planning to avoid exceedance of thresholds in harbour porpoise SACs.

This report may not be fully accessible for all users. If you need a copy in a different or more accessible format, please get in touch.

Resource type Publication

Topic category Environment

Reference date 2024·12·01

Citation
JNCC. 2024. Impulsive noise in the Southern North Sea SAC and other harbour porpoise SACs (2022–2024). JNCC Report 788. JNCC, Peterborough, ISSN 0963-8091.

Lineage
This report was produced by JNCC for Defra with funding from Defra’s Offshore Wind Enabling Actions Programme (OWEAP).

Responsible organisation
Communications, JNCC publisher

Limitations on public access No limitations

Use constraints Available under the Open Government Licence 3.0

Metadata date 2024·12·18

Metadata point of contact
Communications, JNCC

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