March 7, 2019 — Hunched over a laptop, Jeff Dement pointed to a virtual map showing lease areas for offshore wind off New Jersey’s coast.
He clicked on the legend and added a layer showing where scallop fishing overlaps with potential turbine locations.
“You could do this for days,” said Dement, fish tagging program director for the American Littoral Society, as he gave a tutorial of an online data portal published by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council on the Ocean.
A few anglers gathered behind him inside a conference room in the Ocean County Library, where offshore wind developers and fishers gathered Wednesday evening to discuss how the two groups can lessen proposed wind projects’ disturbance of wildlife.