Presentations

Abstract

The rapid expansion of offshore wind development off the northeastern United States (US) has led to an increase in monitoring efforts designed to assess the potential effects on commercially and recreationally important fisheries. Despite collecting essential data for finfish and shellfish stock assessments, traditional “extractive” survey techniques (e.g., trawls, traps, and gillnets) are problematic as they increase removals of target species and increase the potential for interactions with protected species. In addition to the challenges of sampling near offshore wind infrastructure, there is an increased focus on the use of “non-extractive” survey techniques to monitor fisheries resources during all phases of offshore wind development. A Baited Remote Underwater Video (BRUV) and Environmental DNA (eDNA) survey is therefore being conducted to evaluate fish community composition and relative abundance before, during, and after construction of an offshore wind farm in the New York Bight. Beginning in June 2023, the survey collects pre-construction fish diversity and abundance information at eight planned wind turbine generator (WTG) positions within the lease area every three months. Recorded video footage is processed and analyzed manually to enumerate fish observed in each video for evaluating fish diversity and relative abundance (i.e., MaxN). Water samples are collected at each WTG position to elucidate fish community composition via eDNA and compare with data collected from the BRUV deployments. Results from the 2023 and 2024 survey years demonstrate that BRUV and eDNA methodologies detected different numbers of taxa due to their innate biases and intricacies, reinforcing the need to use multiple methods in tandem to provide a holistic view of community composition within the study area.  Overall, these methods could strengthen environmental baselines and post-construction monitoring under European regulatory frameworks and support current and future regional monitoring initiatives.