International Antifouling Conference 2025

The collaboration between the University of Essex and Brightlingsea Harbour Commissioners investigating local antifouling practices is now over a year into its research. Over the last year, antifouling panels have been deployed in Brightlingsea Harbour to monitor the growth of marine fouling across different biocidal and non-biocidal coatings. Early findings are providing insights into the performance of these various coatings in real-world conditions.

Monthly photos of the panels are being collected, with percentage coverage of fouling being calculated using a trained machine learning model. This will be the first time such data has been collected in the waters around Brightlingsea, with this quantifiable data being available in the near future.

Recently, Jacob Cook who is a PHD student carrying out the research attended the International Antifouling Conference 2025 in Sweden, where he was able to present this cutting-edge research to industry leaders and academics from all around the world. While this was an amazing opportunity to share antifouling research on an international scale, it is equally important to spread awareness of sustainable practices locally to help protect our marine environments in the long term.

With this project ongoing and more data to be collected, if you want to be the first to hear about results, be involved with the project, or have any general questions, you can contact Jacob at jacob.cook@essex.ac.uk.

Look out for the updated results and project progress in next year’s Brightlingsea Harbour Visitor Guide & Tide Tables 2026. Ready to collect from the Harbour office January 2026.