Funding agency: The Research Council of Norway, Collaborative and Knowledge-building Project
Project period: 2024-2028
Project leader: Alessandro Cresci
Project participants (from our team): Reidun Bjelland, Caroline Durif, Howard Browman, Anne Berit Skiftesvik, Guosong Zhang
Project summary
Offshore wind farms (OWF) will occupy thousands of square kilometers of the continental shelf. As such, OWF represent the most expansive industrialization of the ocean in history. Turbines will have a semipermanent footprint on marine ecosystems, with societal and economic consequences. For an eco-sustainable development of OWF, forecasts of their impacts on marine organisms, before the turbines are built, are essential. Current impact/risk assessments are based upon years of data collection, producing results that are site-specific and available long after installation. WindFisk will develop a unique tool to forecast the impacts that planned OWF will have on the dispersal and distribution of marine fish larvae, juveniles and adults of commercially and ecologically important species. Although large areas of the continental shelf have been allocated to the development of OW, how OWF will affect the early-life and adult stages of fish is still a major knowledge gap. OWF introduce underwater noise and magnetic fields (EMF) up to kilometers away from the facilities, altering sensory cues that fish use and, thereby, their behavior (e.g. orientation and dispersal). WindFisk will use a multidisciplinary approach to characterize the noise and EMF at OWF and assess how fish respond to both of these signals throughout the life cycle. The physical and behavioral data will be used in larval dispersal and spatial distribution models coupled with underwater noise/EMF propagation models to simulate OWF-associated shifts in distribution of fishes. This approach represents a breakthrough, as it is applicable in any geographical area of interest before OWF are in place and the results are relevant at any location. The project will incorporate the models and data into a forecasting application on a digital platform as a tool to forecast the risk of any planned OWF. The ambition is for WindFisk to lead a shift from a “reactive” to a “forecasting” paradigm in the science of OW impacts.