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Endangered Atlantic Sturgeon in the New York Wind Energy Area: implications of future development in an offshore wind energy site.

ABSTRACT: Imminent development of offshore wind farms on the outer continental shelf of the United States has led to significant concerns for marine wildlife. The scarcity of empirical data regarding fish species that may utilize development sites, further compounded by the novelty of the technology and inherent difficulty of conducting offshore research, make identification and assessment of potential stressors to species of concern problematic. However, there is broad potential to mitigate putatively negative impacts to seasonal migrants during the exploration and construction phases. The goal of this study was to establish baseline information on endangered Atlantic Sturgeon in the New York Wind Energy Area (NY WEA), a future offshore development site. Passive acoustic transceivers equipped with acoustic release mechanisms were used to monitor the movements of tagged fish in the NY WEA from November 2016 through February 2018 and resulted in detections of 181 unique individuals throughout the site. Detections were highly seasonal and peaked from November through January. Conversely, fish were relatively uncommon or entirely absent during the summer months (July-September). Generalized additive models indicated that predictable transitions between coastal and offshore habitat were associated with long-term environmental cues and localized estuarine conditions, specifically the interaction between photoperiod and river temperature. These insights into the ecology of marine-resident Atlantic Sturgeon are crucial for both defining monitoring parameters and guiding threat assessments in offshore waters and represent an important initial step towards quantitatively evaluating Atlantic Sturgeon at a scale relevant to future development.

SUBMITTER: Ingram EC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6711969 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:In previous work, the authors demonstrated how data from climate simulations can be utilized to estimate regional wind power densities. In particular, it was shown that the quality of wind power densities, estimated from the UPSCALE global dataset in offshore regions of Mexico, compared well with regional high resolution studies. Additionally, a link between surface temperature and moist air density in the estimates was presented. UPSCALE is an acronym for UK on PRACE (the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe)-weather-resolving Simulations of Climate for globAL Environmental risk. The UPSCALE experiment was performed in 2012 by NCAS (National Centre for Atmospheric Science)-Climate, at the University of Reading and the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. The study included a 25.6-year, five-member ensemble simulation of the HadGEM3 global atmosphere, at 25km resolution for present climate conditions. The initial conditions for the ensemble runs were taken from consecutive days of a test configuration. In the present paper, the emphasis is placed on the single climate run for a potential future climate scenario in the UPSCALE experiment dataset, using the Representation Concentrations Pathways (RCP) 8.5 climate change scenario. Firstly, some tests were performed to ensure that the results using only one instantiation of the current climate dataset are as robust as possible within the constraints of the available data. In order to achieve this, an artificial time series over a longer sampling period was created. Then, it was shown that these longer time series provided almost the same results than the short ones, thus leading to the argument that the short time series is sufficient to capture the climate. Finally, with the confidence that one instantiation is sufficient, the future climate dataset was analysed to provide, for the first time, a projection of future changes in wind power resources using the UPSCALE dataset. It is hoped that this, in turn, will provide some guidance for wind power developers and policy makers to prepare and adapt for climate change impacts on wind energy production. Although offshore locations around Mexico were used as a case study, the dataset is global and hence the methodology presented can be readily applied at any desired location.

Dataset Information

Endangered Atlantic Sturgeon in the New York Wind Energy Area: implications of future development in an offshore wind energy site.

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