From Insight to Impact: reflections on 2025 and the flightpath ahead

A year that redefined what’s possible offshore

Continuous bird monitoring offshore: lessons from 2025 projects

This year, Spoor’s technology reached new depths and distances. Through pioneering projects such as Hywind Tampen in Norway, Borssele with Ørsted in the Netherlands, or TotalEnergies in the North Sea, we demonstrated that continuous, autonomous bird monitoring offshore is not only feasible but scalable. Each deployment added real-world evidence to one of the sector’s biggest questions, how to align renewable energy growth with biodiversity protection.

“Each project we take on reinforces a simple idea: the future of wind energy depends on the quality and transparency of the environmental data that supports it.”— Ask Helseth

Our collaborations expanded across Europe, from RWE’s SeaMe project in Germany, which is setting a new standard for ecosystem-based monitoring, to our upcoming work with RVO in the Netherlands, supporting the development of national frameworks for offshore ecological data and transparency.

Together, these projects brought our mission into sharper focus, delivering transparent, high-resolution biodiversity data that supports smarter decision-making.

Strengthening our foundation

How Spoor’s 2025 growth strengthened its AI and data capabilities

2025 was also a year of internal growth. Our Series A funding round strengthened Spoor’s foundation, allowing us to invest in both technology and people.

We strengthened our commercial and customer functions, expanding capacity in business development, account growth, and partner relations to support Spoor’s global reach. On the technology side, we added depth to our engineering and design capabilities with new expertise in machine learning, software infrastructure, and user experience, including a Principal Engineer and UX Designer dedicated to improving product performance and usability.

These additions reflect our long-term vision: to make AI-powered biodiversity monitoring a reliable, intuitive, and scalable part of every wind project.

“Our mission is not only about building technology but about building trust. Every improvement in accuracy, usability, and transparency moves the industry forward.”— Ask Helseth

From evidence to impact

Why reliable biodiversity data is shaping the future of wind energy

Across the year, we saw biodiversity monitoring move from a compliance task to a core part of project value. Developers and regulators alike are now prioritising data transparency, open evidence sharing, and integrated, multi-modal systems that combine video, radar, and acoustic inputs. The shift is being driven by clear market realities.

Incomplete or inconsistent ecological data is no longer just a scientific issue; it represents real financial and operational risk. Projects with limited baseline evidence face slower permitting, increased mitigation requirements, and uncertainty that can affect investor confidence. Reliable biodiversity data has become a form of project insurance, enabling more predictable timelines and reduced exposure to regulatory challenges.

At the same time, regulation itself is evolving. In Germany, environmental authorities are tightening evidence requirements for both pre- and post-construction monitoring, reinforcing the need for transparent, validated datasets. In Australia, new offshore wind regulations under the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure (OEI) framework are mandating long-term biodiversity monitoring for project approval. In South Africa, recent policy developments are integrating biodiversity risk into national environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures, setting the stage for stricter monitoring obligations across the region.

These trends, echoed across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, point toward one conclusion: biodiversity data is becoming as central to project certainty as engineering or finance. Spoor’s work this year has directly contributed to that evolution by providing developers with continuous, verifiable data that meets the emerging standard for ecological accountability.

Evolving our product: accuracy and precision

Improving accuracy in AI-based biodiversity monitoring systems

2025 was a year of steady progress for Spoor’s technology platform, focused on strengthening the accuracy and reliability of our AI-powered monitoring system.

We expanded our operational footprint across multiple new sites and significantly increased our offshore dataset. This growth boosted Spoor’s training corpus by nearly 40%, resulting in a 10% improvement in baseline detection performance. In practice, customers are already seeing higher detection confidence and model precision, showing how continuous, data-driven learning directly enhances monitoring quality.

Spoor’s latest classification models now achieve precision levels above 90% across both object and track identification, enabling more accurate species recognition and deeper behavioural insight at turbine scale. Combined with improved flight-path modelling, these updates provide clearer evidence for understanding how birds interact with offshore infrastructure. We also advanced our long-range stereoscopic camera technology, now capable of pinpointing bird positions within metres of their true location at distances exceeding a kilometre. This refinement delivers greater spatial accuracy and ecological context, even under challenging offshore conditions.

Spoor continued to innovate at the edges of detection capability, developing long-range infrared methods for nocturnal monitoring and expanding automated classification pipelines for future large-scale deployments.

Each of these developments brings us closer to our goal: delivering science-grade biodiversity data that regulators can trust, operators can act on, and the industry can build upon.

The path forward

What’s next for AI-powered biodiversity monitoring in wind energy

As we look to 2026, our direction is clear:

• Scale deployments globally to support offshore and onshore biodiversity monitoring.
• Deepen integrations across sensors, analytics, and operational systems.
• Continue building the evidence base that enables faster permitting, stronger baselines, and measurable biodiversity outcomes.

The progress made this year belongs to every partner, client, and colleague who believes in combining technology and ecology for a sustainable future.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Here’s to a new year of collaboration, innovation, and shared purpose!

📍 For more updates on Spoor’s technology, partnerships, and research, follow us on LinkedIn or get in touch with our team.