What is PEBL's marine biodiversity monitoring service?
PEBL runs camera-led biodiversity monitoring programmes for marine sites in the UK. We design the study, supply the underwater cameras and environmental sensors, either deploy them ourselves or train your team to, then analyse everything that comes back and deliver an auditable dataset and a written technical report.

Who is the service for?
Seaweed and shellfish farms, marine restoration projects, offshore renewable developers, environmental consultancies and research institutions. In short, any operator who needs defensible evidence about what lives at their site and how it is changing.

Does PEBL do the fieldwork, or do we?
Either. We deploy directly where a site calls for it, and for other sites we run an on-site training day so your team or a local community partner can do the in-water work and keep that capability. Study design, analysis and reporting are always done by PEBL.

Do we have to buy the equipment?
No. All hardware is included in a monitoring programme. You can also buy or rent SubCam cameras and GrowProbe sensors separately if you would rather run monitoring yourself.

What is the difference between buying a SubCam and using the monitoring service?
Buying a SubCam gives you the instrument. The service gives you the study design, expert species analysis, environmental context and a report. The analysis is what turns footage into evidence a regulator or funder will accept.

How much does marine biodiversity monitoring cost?
A camera-led monitoring season starts from £5,000 a year. Our six-camera, multi-control flagship season is typically from £15,500 ex VAT at a sheltered site and from £16,500 at an offshore site, with vessel and offshore logistics arranged locally by the client. Every programme is scoped to the site, so these are typical figures rather than fixed prices.

Can you analyse footage we already have?
Yes. Processing-only costs £75 per hour of footage and includes marine-biologist review, species identification and quality control. That is roughly 40 to 50% below typical UK consultancy rates.

Why do you publish your prices when most competitors don't?
We are a Community Interest Company and affordability is part of our purpose. A small operator should be able to find out whether they can afford monitoring without having to book a sales call first.

Why is PEBL less expensive than an environmental consultancy?
We build our own hardware, so instrument cost is a fraction of commercial equivalents, and we use machine-assisted annotation to reduce the analyst time that dominates the cost of any video-based monitoring programme.

Can you help us find funding for monitoring?
Yes. Most of the monitoring we have delivered was paid for by a grant rather than an operating budget. Where the monitoring genuinely fits the project, we will apply alongside you as a named monitoring partner and write the methodology, evidence plan and budget lines for the bid.

What is a BACI or control-impact study?
BACI stands for Before-After-Control-Impact. You measure your site alongside one or more comparable control sites, before and after whatever you want to assess. Without a control you cannot tell whether an observed change was caused by your site or by a wider seasonal or regional shift.

Why use more than one control site?
Multiple controls change the question from whether your site is different from one other place to whether your site is outside the range of natural variation. That is a far stronger claim and much harder to challenge.

How long does a monitoring programme need to run?
A single season gives a strong spatial comparison between your site and its controls. Two to three years gives a genuine before-and-after trend. Programmes are normally structured as seasonal deployments repeated year on year.

What data streams can you combine?
Video, passive acoustics, eDNA and water quality, all recorded against a single shared timeline. Laboratory panels for nutrients, heavy metals and seaweed tissue chemistry can be added where a project needs them.

What is eDNA monitoring and when is it useful?
eDNA metabarcoding identifies species from genetic traces left in water or sediment samples, detecting species that never pass in front of a camera. It works best on soft, relatively undisturbed sediment and is much less useful on rocky or heavily disturbed seabed.

When do we need passive acoustic monitoring?
When cetaceans are known or expected in the area. A passive acoustic logger records porpoise and dolphin echolocation clicks continuously and distinguishes them from boat sonar, building a year-round picture that no camera or diver survey can produce.

What species can you actually detect?
On one full annual programme our cameras recorded more than 50 species and lowest-identified taxonomic units around a single farm, from resident crabs, brittle stars and gobies to seasonal shoals of whiting, pouting and scad. Camera monitoring covers fish and larger invertebrates, and eDNA extends that to species that cameras cannot see.

Does the equipment need servicing during a season?
Programmes include swap-out cameras so coverage never drops mid-season. Units are exchanged on a service cycle rather than left in the water until they fail.

What do we actually receive at the end?
A written technical report setting out what was found, how it was measured, what changed relative to the controls and what the limitations are. It is written to go straight to a regulator, funder or certifier without translation. You also get access to your data hosted on pebl-data.cloud.

Can our regulator or funder access the data directly?
Yes. Data hosted on pebl-data.cloud supports access for your own team, your funder and your regulator.

Can this evidence support a marine licence application?
Yes. Monitoring evidence from one of our community farm programmes supported a marine licence extension from five years to twenty.