Abstract
Offshore wind energy development is occurring throughout the Northeast Large Marine Ecosystem and will interact with many marine use sectors, including fisheries. Wind areas overlap spatially with the footprint of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) multispecies bottom trawl survey, which has been conducted since the 1960s, and provides data that are relied upon for the assessment and management of many fisheries stocks in the Northeast U.S. This fishery-independent survey is confronted by potential preclusion of trawl sampling due to the spatial conflict arising from offshore wind energy development. My thesis quantifies the impacts of preclusion to survey operations and how changes to species distributions and abundances within wind areas could jointly affect downstream data products, such as stock abundance indices, and fisheries management advice. The first phase of my study uses the empirical data to serve as a proxy for expected impacts to survey data products when the survey is precluded from sampling within offshore wind energy areas (wind-precluded survey effort). Findings suggest that abundance indices are impacted most for species where there were larger differences in their catch rates in and outside of wind areas. The second phase of my study used survey data for summer flounder (Paralichthys dentatus) and Atlantic mackerel (Scomber scombrus) as case studies to fit spatiotemporal generalized linear mixed effects models (GLMMs), simulate survey data, calculate indices of abundance and population trends, and compare survey outcomes with and without preclusion from wind development areas. The results of the modeling indicate that spatiotemporal models can be used to simulate new survey data and evaluate impacts to the survey (and survey data products) when it is precluded from offshore wind energy areas. Further employing the species distribution operating models, I conducted a simulation study to examine changes in fish density under assumed changes in species productivity within wind areas, and their effects on survey catch rates under wind-precluded survey effort. Findings conclude that estimates of abundance indices and population trends will be most biased if species experience enhanced productivity and survey effort is precluded within these areas. Thus, it is important that the losses in survey effort and data be mitigated to maintain at a minimum the existing understanding of species’ relative abundance. This study contributes directly to implementation of the Federal Survey Mitigation Strategy for the Northeast U.S. Region as a part of the Survey Simulation Evaluation and Experimentation Project, which aims to assess potential impacts to the bottom trawl survey operations and data products and identify mitigation strategies to maintain data integrity. Furthermore, this study contributes to the current knowledge surrounding the impacts that offshore wind energy development can have on fishery-independent surveys, which globally is scarce.