The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has announced it has selected five multi-year projects totaling more than US$ 2 million to further study important environmental and commercial fishing topics to support the responsible development of offshore wind.
The selected projects include:
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) with the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) and others – Collaborative Development of Strategies and Tools to Address Commercial Fishing: A two-year, $500,000 project to address the need to understand and develop solutions for safe and efficient access to fishing grounds, while also ensuring that offshore energy projects meet their operational goals.
- Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA) – Creation of a “Data Trust” for Effective Inclusion of Fishermen’s Knowledge in Offshore Wind Energy Decision Making: A one-year, nearly $300,000 project to develop high-quality, evidence-based science products that can improve decision-making for offshore wind development, with additional benefits for ecosystem-based assessment and fisheries stock assessment and management.
- Biodiversity Research Institute – Multi-Scale Relationships Between Marine Predators and Forage Fish: A three-year, nearly $500,000 project designed to better understand the linkages between forage fish and seabirds and implications of offshore wind development on seabird behaviors and distribution.
- Ecology and Environment – Environmental and Fisheries Research for Offshore Wind: An 18-month, $500,000 project to develop spatially and temporally dynamic information about the distribution of oceanographic characteristic in the New York Bight through the development and application of a dedicated multi-year 3-D flow model to wildlife distribution movements.
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Development of Monitoring Protocols for Nanotag Studies at Offshore Wind Farms: A two-year, nearly $300,000 project to develop standardized guidelines to inform the use of miniature digitally-coded VHF (very high frequency) transmitters to monitor birds and bats in relation to offshore wind energy development.
