Scientific use of the sailbuoy unmanned surface vehicle to monitor Antarctic krill

The wind and solar powered Sailbuoy unmanned surface vehicle was used to survey Antarctic Krill abundance during two missions in the Southern Ocean. The 2021 mission to cover transects off the South Orkney islands to obtain a classical biomass estimate was hampered by collisions with sea ice and limited navigational precision. The 2023 mission to monitor prey on a krill feeding hotspot was successful and provided an otherwise unavailable backscatter time series covering a 10x40 km area. We found the Sailbuoy most suitable in station keeping mode, acting as a self-deploying and recovering “mooring” that can provide echosounder data in near-real time.