Harbour seal disturbance trials in the Sound of Islay: SCOS Briefing Paper

The Sound of Islay study site provides an opportunity to develop and test observation protocols for assessing disturbance of seals. The planned construction of a ten-turbine tidal array in the sound offers scope for gauging the impacts of turbine deployment, maintenance and operation on seal behaviour within and around haulouts in the vicinity. Few telemetry studies have focused on behavioural correlates associated with disturbance with the use of telemetry (Andersen et al. 2013). Assessing the level of disturbance at any site will likely involve an analysis of the connectivity between haulout sites in an area, the short term movement rates between inter-connected sites and the responses of animals to individual and repeated disturbance events. This is especially important at the Sound of Islay where seals move between haul-out sites within the sound around the proposed development and the South-East Islay Skerries SAC (Sparling 2013).