Dr Kate Gormley

External Memberships

• Member - Marine Alliance For Science and Technology (MASTS) Oil and Gas Environmental Research Forum

• Member – Society for Underwater Technology (SUT) Salvage and Decommissioning Committee

• Member – SUT Decommissioning Working Group
• Member – Productive Seas Evidence Group (UK Marine Science and Coordination Committee)

Research Overview

Kate's research interests include environmental aspects of the offshore energy industries (particularly environmental monitoring, policy and decommissioning); cumulative and environmental assessment; Marine Spatial Planning; GIS; habitat mapping; Marine Protected Areas and Priority Marine Habitats management.  Kate also has an interest in participatory mapping, and the development of mapping tools for use by a range of stakeholders.

Kate has an offshore energy industry background with over 12 years' experience, working directly within the industry operators, consultancies and regulators, before returning to academia. Kate is particularly interested in Knowledge Exchange between these industries and academia.

Current Research

Connectivity of Hard Substrate Assemblages in the North Sea (2020-2023), NERC/INSITE: The aim of this project is to enhance our understanding of the connectivity of epifauna populations across artificial substrata in the North Sea. The CHASANS Project will deliver improved larval connectivity models necessary to provide guidance on decommissioning and derogation of artificial structures in the North Sea. Ground-truthing studies will be employed to validate models by collecting data on larval behaviours, including transport, seasonality and life-cycling, and settlement succession from several epifaunal species, and to assess genetic connectivity between hard substrata populations.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Knowledge Exchange Fellowship (2014-22), NERC: Kate's fellowship will look at the challenges currently facing the offshore oil and gas industry and how environmental data generated by both academia and industry can be managed effectively. Kate is also involved in number of industry and academic knowledge exchange activities, particularly focussing on decommissioning challenges and environmental management, through membership of various industry and academic working groups.  Kate hosted a Design for Decommissioning workshop in 2018 and she will be aiming to host more industry/academic workshops in the future.  Kate has recently completed work on an online mapping portal for offshore environmental surveys, Oil & Gas Environment Interactive.

Past Research

Marine Growth Analysis on Decommissioning Offshore Installations (2016-17), NERC Oil & Gas Decommissioning Innovation: This project is a scoping/proof of concept study and aims to use the method developed by the CoralNet project and applying it to survey footage from offshore platforms on the UKCS.  The aim of the project is to train the software to identify the main marine growth species on UKCS platforms and to calculate their percentage cover. 

Atlantic Innovation (2014-15), Heriot-Watt University, NERC Innovation: Environmental data management, specifically look at environmental monitoring and management issues to the west of Shetland.

North Sea Interactive (2014), Heriot-Watt University,  NERC Innovation: North Sea Interactive translated marine environmental data into GIS Shapefiles for use by industry and academia. 

Funding and Grants

2020-23 Connectivity of Hard Substrate Assemblages in the North Sea, NERC/INSITE

2016-17 Marine Growth Analysis on Decommissioning Offshore Installations, NERC (CO-I)

2014-22 Knowledge Exchange Fellowship (Oil and Gas), NERC (PI)