About Tethys

Tethys has been developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to support the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Wind and Water Power Program. The primary function of Tethys is to facilitate the creation, annotation, and exchange of information on the environmental effects of MHK and OSW technology. Tethys serves as a publically accessible knowledge base and portal on research into environmental effects.

Tethys is part of a program of research and development - together with complementary efforts of other DOE national laboratories, National Marine Renewable Energy Centers, universities and industry - focused on unraveling the complexity of environmental issues associated with offshore renewable energy technologies. Tethys provides a suite of basic data manipulation functions and well-developed export and communication functions to connect to other databases, statistical and modeling packages, and reporting functions.

Use of Tethys

Tethys brings together the most current information on environmental effects of ocean energy development and acts as a collaborative research space for scientists and engineers developing information on the effects of devices, moorings, anchors, and power cables on the marine and riverine environments. The following people may find use of Tethys:

Project Developers can view research findings that will assist with siting offshore renewable projects while minimizing risk to the environment;
Regulatory Agencies will find support for permitting processes and natural resource management decisions in order to streamline the permitting process;
Stakeholders may find knowledge on locations of proposed projects and what environmental studies have been carried out;
Researchers can easily sift through relevant environmental documents to assist in studies.

Advantages to the Tethys Development Platform

Tethys has been developed using Sematic MediaWiki, supporting a “smart” database that has certain advantages over standard databases. Tethys, drawing on many years of software and systems development from the Knowledge Encapsulation Framework (KEF) at PNNL, allows for sematic searches and the organization of data through tagging of individual files, documents, and multi-media products. Tethys is monitored and all content is quality assured and curated to maintain content that is current and accurate. Feedback and suggestions from users are actively encouraged through a blog or direct contact; Tethys developers and curators routinely upgrade functionality and content, based on user input.

Knowledge Base

The core of Tethys is a knowledge base that organizes information on the environmental effects of offshore renewable energy development. The Knowledge Base draws together data, metadata, supporting reports, relevant papers, videos, and other material to provide a current state of knowledge of environmental effects. The information provided in the Tethys knowledge base covers three categories of development:

Marine and hydrokinetic energy (MHK),
Offshore wind energy (OSW), and
An international collaboration of MHK effects (Annex IV).

Media is arranged in a table that is sortable by columns, where clicking the title will open more information in a new tab. Content can also be searched and sorted through filters such as collection, technology type, system stressors, environmental receptors, document type, and keyword searches. The knowledge base page can be accessed at the Tethys Knowledge Base.

Map Viewer

While no content is provided that is unavailable in the knowledge base, the Tethys map viewer shows the location of sites and documents that are associated with a geographic location. This creates a visual way to identify projects and studies on an international scale. The information provided in the Tethys map viewer covers four types of locations:

Documents (white) - Any documents that specify a location;
U.S. Permitting Sites (blue) - Permitting MHK sites collected from the Federal Energy Commission (FERC) that provide a link to regulatory documents;
Annex IV Project Sites (orange) - Metadata collected from developers and reports, updated on a regular basis;
Annex IV Research Studies (green) - Metadata collected from researchers who are working on studies not yet published.

Users may zoom and pan across a world projection to find color-coded markers that may be selected to expand a bubble with some details, including a title linked to more information. Content can also be searched and sorted through filters such as collection, country, developer, technology type, and keyword searches. The map viewer page can be accessed at the Tethys Map Viewer.

Recent Content

Our most recently added documents: