Recommendations on monitoring program design for offshore and lake wind farms were developed this a research project.
AquaBiota received funding from the research program Vindval for a project concerning recommendations on how to design monitoring programs for offshore and lake wind farms. Vindval is a cooperation between the Swedish Energy Agency and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. The purpose of the program is to collect and provide scientific knowledge of wind power impacts on humans and nature.
There is a great potential for offshore wind power, but the knowledge about large-scale effects on the marine and freshwater environment is still inadequate. By compiling and analyzing monitoring programs from Sweden and other European countries, conclusions can be drawn about the potential and actual environmental effects, and if the monitoring programs are designed in a way that would detect potential effects or not. Several groups of organisms was investigated, such as marine mammals, birds, fish and benthos. The project also developed a GIS method to look at the cumulative effects of offshore wind power on a geographical scale. Finally, recommendations were given on how to design monitoring programs for offshore and lake wind farms, to be able to detect the potential environmental impacts on the different groups of organisms.
Monitoring programs and other documents were compiled during the fall of 2015. In total 520 documents were compiled, of which 40 were monitoring programs and 75 environmental impact assessments. The documents were mainly from the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden.
Link to Vindval’s status report 2016 (in Swedish).
Report (in Swedish):
Enhus, C., Bergström, H., Müller, R., Ogonowski, M., Isæus, M. 2017: Kontrollprogram för vindkraft i vatten – Sammanställning och granskning, samt förslag till rekommendationer för utformning av kontrollprogram. Naturvårdsverkets rapport 6741 från Vindval.