Abstract
Marine energy devices are installed in highly dynamic environments and have the potential to affect the benthic and pelagic habitats around them. Regulatory bodies often require baseline characterization and/or post-installation monitoring to determine whether changes in these habitats are being observed. However, a great diversity of technologies is available for surveying and sampling marine habitats, and selecting the most suitable instrument to identify and measure changes in habitats at marine energy sites can become a daunting task. We conducted a thorough review of journal articles, survey reports, and grey literature to extract information about the technologies used, the data collection and processing methods, and the performance and effectiveness of these instruments. We examined documents related to marine energy development, offshore wind farms, oil and gas offshore sites, and other marine industries around the world over the last 20 years. A total of 120 different technologies were identified across six main habitat categories: seafloor, sediment, infauna, epifauna, pelagic, and biofouling. The technologies were organized into 12 broad technology classes: acoustic, corer, dredge, grab, hook and line, net and trawl, plate, remote sensing, scrape samples, trap, visual, and others. Visual was the most common and the most diverse technology class, with applications across all six habitat categories. Technologies and sampling methods that are designed for working efficiently in energetic environments have greater success at marine energy sites. In addition, sampling designs and statistical analyses should be carefully thought through to identify differences in faunal assemblages and spatiotemporal changes in habitats.
Highlights
In numerous countries around the world, regulatory authorities require that potential impacts on the marine environment are assessed prior to industrial development at sea, which includes activities such as offshore drilling, dredging, or installing marine energy infrastructure
83 entries were found to be related to the seafloor, 117 entries to sediment, 64 to infauna, 139 to epifauna, 96 to pelagic, and 34 to biofouling
Not all technologies were employed within each habitat category and some technologies were more commonly used than others (Figures 1 and 2)
Summary
In numerous countries around the world, regulatory authorities require that potential impacts on the marine environment are assessed prior to industrial development at sea, which includes activities such as offshore drilling, dredging, or installing marine energy infrastructure. In the United States (U.S.), water quality is regulated by the Clean Water Act [4] and associated acts, while habitats and species of special concern are regulated by various policies such as the Endangered Species Act [5], Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act [6], and Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act [7] In accordance with these regulations, environmental monitoring requirements for marine energy projects often include the identification and measurement of changes in benthic and pelagic habitats and, while long-term surveys are necessary to rule out extreme and rare events from occasional samplings, settling on the appropriate sampling technologies, methods, and analyses is as important as the spatiotemporal coverage to identify changes [8,9]. Biological communities are dynamic systems that change over time until reaching a state of persistence, a certain level of equilibrium that allows for temporal variation [12,13], which needs to be taken into account when designing and interpreting the results of surveys
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