April 19, 2019 — Upcoming offshore wind projects proposed for areas on the East Coast of the United States will have an impact on NOAA Fisheries surveys, presenting new challenges to scientists by potentially resulting in less-effective fisheries data.
At a special session of the New England Fisheries Management Council covering offshore wind, Wendy Gabriel, of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, outlined a wide number of concerns for the organization regarding the development of wind power along the coast. Chief among the concerns was the organization’s ability to continue conducting viable fishery surveys – which provide much of the data that the council uses to establish fishing quotas.
“The bottom-line here is, nearly all of the long-term fishery independent surveys that have coverage will be affected,” she said during the session.
There’s already a wide number of potential offshore wind projects planned for the east coast, with multiple leased areas totaling thousands of acres of land dotting the coast. Almost all of those planned areas overlap some of the survey “strata” which NOAA Fisheries uses to plan its surveys.
Typically, according to Gabriel, the center will randomly select areas of each survey “stratum” to determine where trawls will be preformed to get data on certain fisheries – from Atlantic sea scallops to surf clams. However, currently, leased areas overlap in every single strata area; at the lowest end, 30 percent of each strata is occupied by an offshore wind lease.
“Right now, we use a random stratified survey design, and that involves picking locations at random in a stratum, and now we’re not going to be able to do that, because there will be turbines in the neighborhood,” Gabriel said.
That could pose a problem, depending on how spaced out the wind turbines are, and what sort of uses are allowed in the wind energy areas.