A warm welcome to new Environmental Planning team members Alex Gorringe and Sue Crooks
APEM Group are delighted to welcome Senior EIA Consultants, Alex Gorringe and Sue Crooks to the Environmental Planning team. Working...
APEM Group, a leading global environmental consultancy, recently appointed Sean Sweeney to the role of Country Manager for APEM Group in Australia. Based in the APEM Group office in Melbourne, Sean will be able to engage directly with clients in Australia and lead the group’s work supporting the burgeoning offshore wind sector.
Sean Sweeney, Country Manager – Australia
Sean has led Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) for large scale and significant developments as well as ecological appraisals for smaller scale projects, with a particular focus on ornithology and offshore renewables.
An experienced ecologist and ornithologist, Sean has been involved in bird, mammal and broader ecological surveys (including those for protected species and habitats), data analysis, reporting and impact assessments for over 17 years as a consultant and over 22 years through voluntary national surveys for national bodies in the UK. He is fortunate to have worked across multiple teams in the Group and in the UK, Ireland, Europe, the US and Australia, as birds are typically linked to many APEM Group projects.
Large scale marine wildlife surveys for offshore wind were in their infancy when Sean joined APEM Group in 2012. As the need for accurate data grew alongside the industry, Sean and the team have developed multiple new and innovative techniques that are widely used across the industry, leading to Sean speaking at global conferences on specialist offshore ornithology topics and becoming Head of Ornithology Consultancy in 2021.
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The APEM Group ornithology team are among the largest specialists in offshore ornithology across the globe, and I’m enormously proud of my part in growing that team. The team’s reputation has also grown through our robust scientific approaches and integrity, and hard work for each other and for APEM Group clients. As my role changes, I remain an ornithologist and am passionate about the birds in my adopted new country of Australia. We rely on continual learning about the science we love, because what you know and what you’ll need to know come from both within and outside the regular nine to five job: it comes from wider reading, field work and from a lifetime of bird observations and learning. Any scientist would say the same.
Sean Sweeney Country Manager – Australia
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As an expert in marine wildlife surveys, data collection and analysis, strategic advice for offshore wind, seabird and shorebird impact assessment, mitigation and compensation (offsetting), Sean brings knowledge and experience to his new role. But this role will also be to help steer, listen and influence, with an understanding of how all the elements of the industry piece together.
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There are many facets to offshore wind projects, from grid connections, an intertidal perspective for ports and harbours, to cable laying and landfall. We’re combining best practice and innovative techniques to new geographies to understand species in new environments. The most interesting thing is discovering the abundancies of certain species, their distribution across different areas, patterns in their behaviour and seasonal changes in their occurrence. Now that we have been collecting these data for the first time in Australia it’s exciting as an ornithologist to piece it all together.
Sean Sweeney Country Manager – Australia
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Sean has enjoyed a lifetime of ornithology, with 20-plus years of working professionally as well as voluntary work undertaking breeding bird surveys, wetland and waterways bird surveys and involvement in regional and national Atlas projects, and contributions to scientific papers, grey literature and ornithological books.
Contact our team if you’d like to know more about APEM Group in Australia or to talk about ornithology and offshore wind.
Further Reading
APEM Group expands global presence with first Australian office
Supporting Australia’s first steps into offshore wind energy
Press release – APEM Group appoints Sean Sweeney
Press release – APEM Group appoints Tara Kennedy
Acknowledgement of Country
We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present.
About APEM Group
With locations across the globe, APEM Group provide independent environmental consultancy and expert scientific advice to a wide range of industries including water, renewables, infrastructure, power and utilities, ports and harbours as well as to regulators and governments around the world.
We provide a range of services to clients including our world leading digital aerial wildlife surveys, environmental impact assessments, marine, water & terrestrial ecology, geospatial insights, shipping and navigational risk assessments and landscape visualisation.
Find out more: www.apemgroup.com
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Sean Sweeney Profile
Large scale surveys collecting data on marine wildlife for offshore wind farms were still in their infancy as Sean joined APEM Group in 2012. Sean has seen many changes in both surveying and impact assessment methodologies and technologies. From boat-based surveys through to digital aerial surveys and from paper field records to digital field data collection, Sean’s team have been providing expert advice and guidance on ornithology matters, making use of the latest technologies and research to drive innovations and delivering robust evidence-led EIAs and Habitat Regulation Assessments (HRAs) both in the UK and Ireland, and in more recent years, the United States, Asia and Australia.
In a first for the company, Sean project managed a 24 month data collection programme of Digital Aerial Surveys (DAS) for a Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP). This project, an offshore wind farm (OWF), was also the first project to go through the Development Consent Order process and the first project in the world to rely on DAS data to characterise its baseline for offshore ornithology assessments. The project was also the first through the Planning Inspectorates Examination process, replacing the previous process of project reviews through public hearings and representing a learning curve for the developers, for the lawyers and for APEM.
Sean has been called in to represent applicants for offshore ornithological matters through seven Planning Inspectorate Examinations (PINS) – highly pressurised periods of a project’s post-application process. In this phase, many bespoke and innovative reviews of seabird behaviour are undertaken, and developers consider new methods to assessment potential effects from OWFs on species and populations as well as developing mitigation and compensation measures to help reduce or offset any predicted impact levels.
Sean and the APEM Group team have developed multiple new and innovative solutions that are now widely used and applied by other consultants for proposed projects, including the use of tracking data to assess site use by seabirds, SPA connectivity assessments using flight direction statistics, modelling migratory species of birds moving through development sites, apportioning risk between species colonies, developing correction factors for availability bias for auks (guillemots, razorbills and puffins) and harbour porpoise.
This has led to invitations to speak at many conferences on specialist offshore ornithology topics including assessing and predicting abundances and displacement of red-throated divers, gannet responses to OWFs, auk displacement and mortality rates, the effects of OWF lighting on shearwaters, the use of LiDAR to collect seabird flight heights and improve collision risk modelling and other topics.
This experience provided Sean with the opportunity to lead the Ornithology Consultancy team in 2019, becoming APEM Head of Ornithology Consultancy in 2021, which he describes as the pinnacle of his ornithology career and a huge honour.
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