UMass Dartmouth Scientists Seek to Understand How Offshore Wind Development Will Affect Critical Fisheries

The UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science & Technology (SMAST) is involved in various efforts in collaboration with the fishing industry, regulatory agencies, and offshore wind developers to better understand how fisheries and offshore wind can coexist. Ongoing work comprises pre- and post-construction assessments of fisheries, associated ecological conditions, and socio-economic aspects of fisheries, in and around the Vineyard Wind offshore wind lease area, as designated by the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, on the US Outer Continental Shelf.

The framework for this work developed from a series of workshops conducted by SMAST that engaged both fishermen and regulators to consider monitoring options and to identify which elements are most important to local fisheries and which are most important to regulators. Outreach included commercial and recreational fishermen and fishing organizations involved in fisheries that are active in the development area (e.g., squid-mackerel-butterfish, scup-sea bass-fluke, southern New England groundfish, scallop, monkfish-skate, lobster-crab). Monitoring components considered included fishery assessments, fishery resources surveys, tagging, oceanographic monitoring and modeling, socio-economic analysis, and geostatistical integration of monitoring components. Results from these workshops were compiled into “Recommendations for planning pre- and post- construction assessments of fisheries in the Vineyard Wind offshore lease area” dated 24 March 2019 (available at https://www.vineyardwind.com/fisheries-science, and https://www.mafmc.org/northeast-offshore-wind).

From these discussions a series of recommendations to best utilize the present knowledge emerged with the development of an environmental impact study. Seasonal fishery resource surveys were proposed examining the substrate and benthic macroinvertebrate, groundfish and planktonic communities. Supplemental studies were also suggested including juvenile and adult life stages movement patterns using tagging technology, egg and larval dispersal models, optical transect surveys extending from individual turbines, analysis of fisheries monitoring data to detect impacts on highly migratory species, cable monitoring and monitoring of acoustic impacts.

Various types of surveys are now underway. These include those under the leadership of Dean Kevin Stokesbury to examine benthic macro-invertebrate populations. Additionally, seasonal demersal trawl surveys (led by Professor Pingguo He and Technical Associate Chris Rillahan) are being performed to monitor the species abundance, population characteristics and community structure of marine fish and invertebrate communities including commercially important species such as squid, groundfish, summer flounder, whiting and black sea bass.

At the regional scale, oceanographic modeling is a key tool to examine windfarm and fisheries interactions. The wind turbine-resolving coupled meso-scale meteorological model (WRF) and finite-volume community ocean model (FVCOM) system is a state-of-the-art high resolution ocean circulation model under the platform of the Northeast Coastal Ocean Forecast System (NECOFS), with a computational domain covering the regions of the shelf off Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Block Island, Block Island Sound, and Long-Island Sound. Also on the regional scale is acoustic telemetry work led by Professor Steve Cadrin to track cod spawning grounds and migration along the continental shelf. SMAST is also advancing educational efforts to train future scientists with support of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to establish a new offshore wind graduate certificate program, under the leadership of Professor Gavin Fay.