Interim Population Consequences of Disturbance (iPCoD) Code Update - Version 5.2

The Interim Population Consequences of Disturbance (iPCoD) framework was developed by SMRU Consulting and the University of St Andrews in 2013 to forecast the potential effects on marine mammal populations in UK waters of any disturbance, hearing damage or collisions that might result from the construction or operation of offshore renewable energy devices.

A detailed description of the approach can be found in Harwood et al. (2013) and King et al. (2015). The iPCoD framework was designed to cope with the current situation, in which there is only limited knowledge about the potential effects of these developments on marine mammals. It should be recognised that it is very much an interim solution to the evaluation of these effects, and that there remains an urgent need for additional scientific research to address the knowledge gaps that were identified by Harwood et al. (2014).

Since its initial release (v1.0) in February 2014, the iPCoD tool has been used for a number of offshore wind developments in Germany, Netherlands, France and the UK (and possibly others) and has been used to explore the potential population level effects of collisions of a range of species with marine renewable energy devices in Scotland and Wales. Also during this time, SMRU Consulting and John Harwood have explored developing the tool further to improve the model framework.

The current version in use is version 5.2 (released 2nd Oct 2019). The current version is available from the SMRU Consulting iPCoD following the link below. The details of the version log and the amendments made to the code at each release are also available from the link below.

References:

Harwood, J., S. King, R. Schick, C. Donovan & C. Booth 2013. A Protocol for Implementing the Interim Population Consequences of Disturbance (PCoD) Approach: Quantifying and Assessing the Effects of UK Offshore Renewable Energy Developments on Marine Mammal Populations. Scottish Marine and Freshwater Science 5(2). <http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0044/00443360.pdf >

Harwood, J. and King, S.L. (2017). The Sensitivity of UK Marine Mammal Populations to Marine Renewables Developments - Revised Version. Report number SMRUC-MSS-2017-005. (See downloadable resource below).

King, S. L., Schick, R. S., Donovan, C., Booth, C. G., Burgman, M., Thomas, L., et al. (2015). An interim framework for assessing the population consequences of disturbance. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 6(10), 1150e1158. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12411