Abstract

States in the Northeast United States have the ambitious goal of producing more than 22 GW of offshore wind energy in the coming decades. The infrastructure associated with offshore wind energy development is expected to modify marine habitats and potentially alter the ecosystem services. Species distribution models were constructed for a group of fish and macroinvertebrate taxa resident in the Northeast US Continental Shelf marine ecosystem. These models were analyzed to provide baseline context for impact assessment of lease areas in the Middle Atlantic Bight designated for renewable wind energy installations. Using random forest machine learning, models based on occurrence and biomass were constructed for 93 species providing seasonal depictions of their habitat distributions. We developed a scoring index to characterize lease area habitat use for each species. Subsequently, groups of species were identified that reflect varying levels of lease area habitat use ranging across high, moderate, low, and no reliance on the lease area habitats. Among the species with high to moderate reliance were black sea bass (Centropristis striata), summer flounder (Paralichthys dentatus), and Atlantic menhaden (Brevoortia tyrannus), which are important fisheries species in the region. Potential for impact was characterized by the number of species with habitat dependencies associated with lease areas and these varied with a number of continuous gradients. Habitats that support high biomass were distributed more to the northeast, while high occupancy habitats appeared to be further from the coast. There was no obvious effect of the size of the lease area on the importance of associated habitats. Model results indicated that physical drivers and lower trophic level indicators might strongly control the habitat distribution of ecologically and commercially important species in the wind lease areas. Therefore, physical and biological oceanography on the continental shelf proximate to wind energy infrastructure development should be monitored for changes in water column structure and the productivity of phytoplankton and zooplankton and the effects of these changes on the trophic system.

Highlights

  • The provision of ecosystem goods and services is intersecting with the rapid development of the offshore wind industry in continental shelf seas, an effort in energy generation designed in part to ameliorate the effects of climate change (Causon and Gill, 2018; UNEP, 2019)

  • The characterization of occupancy and biomass habitat of fish and macroinvertebrate species allowed the identification of taxa with high dependency on habitats that overlap the wind lease areas in the Northeast US Continental Shelf ecosystem (NES) ecosystem

  • This raises the potential for impact of offshore wind development on these candidate taxa, where impact is broadly defined as the potential direct effects for some species on their habitat and subsequently their growth and reproduction (Stenberg et al, 2015; Raoux et al, 2017)

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Summary

Introduction

The provision of ecosystem goods and services is intersecting with the rapid development of the offshore wind industry in continental shelf seas, an effort in energy generation designed in part to ameliorate the effects of climate change (Causon and Gill, 2018; UNEP, 2019). We have a growing need to develop assessment methods to understand the intersection of fisheries resources with potential offshore wind energy areas. Interactions between wind energy production and fisheries resources occur across trophic levels and life stages, during each phase of energy infrastructure development, and through biotic and abiotic pathways (Boehlert and Gill, 2010; Pezy et al, 2020). The exploration and construction phases of offshore wind development bring periodic elevated noise levels to the marine environment through increased vessel traffic, seismic survey methods, and, in most cases of fixed foundation turbines, impulse pile driving (Wahlberg and Westerberg, 2005; Hatch et al, 2008). The network of power cables associated with wind farms emits electromagnetic fields, which have the potential to affect behavior and movement of commercially valued and migratory species (Hutchison et al, 2020)

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