James Robbins

When did you join Natural Power? 

I joined Natural Power in January 2022. Since then, the ecological modelling team (and wider geospatial team we sit within) has changed and grown, allowing us to support clients and other parts of the business with a wide variety of tasks and services.  

What does your role entail? 

Within the ecological modelling team, we support clients and other parts of the business with a wide variety of tasks. This includes modelling the baseline environment prior to construction and estimating potential impacts from development and operation on animals including birds, bats, marine mammals, fish and invertebrates. This involves working closely with expert ecology teams who use results from our work in their environmental impact assessments and related consent application documents.  

I have also been fortunate to get involved in various research projects as part of my role. For example, we have investigated the use of environmental DNA data collected around an offshore windfarm to characterize the environment, and compared results to those from conventional trawls and grab samples for fish and invertebrates. I have also modelled bat distribution across the entire contiguous USA to investigate where occurrence hotspots may overlap with current and future onshore windfarm buildout, with the view to helping clients to identify potential ecological risks and curtailment requirements.  

What are the most rewarding and challenging parts of your role? 

The most rewarding part of my role is working with a lot of interesting and talented people, on varied projects. In a single week I could be directly working on an environmental impact assessment on marine mammals for an offshore windfarm in Scotland, while supporting our team in France with a seabird assessment, as well as American colleagues with modelling relating to EchoSense, a curtailment system to protect bats. Despite the variety of projects, ultimately most of my job involves some form of coding and using data to answer questions or solve problems - and being a bit of a nerd I really enjoy that! Working with data can also lead to plenty of challenges as datasets come to us in a wide range of formats, qualities, and with different levels of explanation or metadata. However, that is also part of the fun, working out what everything means and how best to use it to answer questions to support renewable energy developments.  

What is the most interesting modelling project you have undertaken and why? 

One of the first projects that I worked on for Natural Power was called BIRDRISK, which ended up spanning two and a half years. This project focussed on estimating the cumulative collision risk of offshore windfarms in the North Sea, English Channel, and Atlantic French coast to seabirds. This essentially means that we modelled collision risk for up to twenty species of seabird, at thirty-two offshore windfarms, with results being used in follow-on projects looking at the impact of these predicted mortalities at the population level. I found this incredibly interesting, as there were plenty of challenges incorporating disparate datasets from aerial and boat-based surveys, and public data sources, but it was rewarding to see the project progress to generating both estimates of collision for each individual windfarm, and cumulative estimates.  

Provide a hidden talent or quirky fact about yourself!? 

I’m not sure if this shows a talent for resilience, or is quirky, or a bit of both! In a previous role with the British Antarctic Survey, I spent eighteen uninterrupted months living and working on the remote sub-Antarctic Island of Bird Island, South Georgia. Over an eight-month winter period, I only saw three other people. Our research station was at the top of a fur seal breeding beach, with wandering albatross overlooking us from a hill, and hundreds of thousands of penguins on the island. My job was to monitor Antarctic fur seals in the summer, leopard seals in the winter, and southern elephant seals in the spring, while also helping out with seabird work. At the end of our winter season, film crews from both BBC’s Blue Planet 2 and Netflix’s Our Planet came to stay and film the wildlife, which gives you an idea of how special a place it is.