As part of ongoing commitments to produce electricity from renewable energy sources in Scotland, Orkney waters have been targeted for potential large-scale deployment of wave and tidal energy converting devices. Orkney has a well-developed infrastructure supporting the marine energy industry; recently enhanced by the construction of additional piers. A major concern to marine industries is biofouling on submerged structures, including energy converters and measurement instrumentation. In this study, the marine energy infrastructure and instrumentation were surveyed to characterise the biofouling. Fouling communities varied between deployment habitats; key species were identified allowing recommendations for scheduling device maintenance and preventing spread of invasive organisms. A method to measure the impact of biofouling on hydrodynamic response is described and applied to data from a wave-monitoring buoy deployed at a test site in Orkney. The results are discussed in relation to the accuracy of the measurement resources for power generation. Further applications are suggested for future testing in other scenarios, including tidal energy.

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Single-author papers are the lowest relative contributors to the research output of international open access journals BioInvasions Records (BIR), Aquatic Invasions (AI) and Management of Biological Invasions (MBI), accounting for 5% or less of published papers. In contrast, papers by four or more authors are the highest contributors, accounting for over half of the research output for the three journals. Papers by two or three authors are intermediate between these extremes, accounting for 15-23% of research ouputs. The relative contributions of research papers by single-authors to the output of AI and MBI has also significantly declined over time, while concurrently those by four or more authors has significantly increased. Although not significant, a similar pattern is also evident in BIR. Considering invasion ecology research, factors such as increasing globalisation, the increasing use of transboundary data-sets for invasive species and the proliferation of collaborative multidisciplinary author teams with multiple skill-sets, may be driving single-author papers to extinction.

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