East Anglia Offshore Windfarm: Zonal Environmental Assessment Benthic Report
Seabed imagery was acquired at each of the 77 anomalous stations in order to further microsite the sample stations to redu ce the possibility of di sruption to any ecol ogically sensitive areas that were encountered. Seabed imagery was acquired from a further five anomalous stations from which no grabs were obtained, thus seabed i magery was gathered from 82 anomalous stations.
Upon finalisation of the EAOW zonal sample array a total of 643 bethic grab stations were allocated to the area of interest, together with 78 trawl stations and 107 seabed imagery stations, with these figures including all grid stations and anomalous stations.
Figures 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7 show the posi tions from which grab, camera and trawl samples were obtained. Note that the posi tions of the additional grab sampl es acquired to i nform EAOW on the pres ence of potential Annex I habitats have not been included in Figure 3.
The final sampling locations, together with a variety of analytical outputs, are presented in the GeoPDF which accompanies this document.
MESL’s quality assurance statement for this project is shown i n Appendix Table 1. The positional data for al l samples acquired throughout the durati on of the ZEA, al ong with field notes for each grab sampl e and seabed image, are pres ented in Appendix Table 2 and Appendix Table 3.
The specific methods used to acquire all grab samples, seabed images and trawl samples are presented in Sections B.2.2 - B.2.4
All Appendix Tables relating to the benthi c data are colour coded as follows:-
Blue – original sampling grid based on the geophysical data acquisition lines
Red – addi tional sample stations allocated as a result of identi fication of seabed rugosi ty by CODA streaming of the acoustic data
