Fishermen skeptical of third environmental monitoring device in the Minas Passage
A third environmental monitoring platform is being tested in the Minas Passage by the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy, or FORCE, but a fishermen’s group maintains the sophisticated equipment being deployed still cannot determine mortality, the ultimate environmental test on marine life in the Bay of Fundy. FAST-3 is a third monitoring platform featuring additional sensors to collect data on fish presence and behaviour that was deployed on Feb 2. Several marine industrial companies around the province contributed to its construction and deployment. The platform isn’t on the actual turbine site but in a 10-metre shallower area adjacent to the Crown-lease area that the Province of Nova Scotia has designated for testing up to five different turbine technologies in the near future. Dr. Haley Viehman, a post-doctoral fellow at Acadia University, will be analyzing the data upon its retrieval within a month. Viehman comes to the province from the University of Maine, where she studied fish interactions for five years using hydro-acoustics to observe fish movements prior, during and after a tidal turbine was deployed in 2012 for a year as a test in Cobscook Bay, Maine. Continue reading the story here 12:31
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