Floating offshore wind farms in the Celtic Sea will churn up the ocean’s hidden boundaries—the fronts where cold, mixed water meets warmer, stratified layers—and researchers are deploying autonomous underwater vehicles, seabird trackers, and satellite data to find out what that means for marine life and fisheries. These ocean fronts are hotspots for plankton blooms, which feed everything from forage fish to seabirds, marine mammals, and commercial fisheries. Yet frontal habitats are poorly studied, and the effects of turbine wakes and infrastructure-induced mixing on them are virtually unknown. FRONTLINE fills that gap by combining AUV-mounted sensors, passive acoustics, and digital aerial surveys to measure how FLOW alters physics, plankton diversity, and predator behaviour in real time. If successful, the project will give regulators and developers a mechanistic basis for siting and operating turbines to minimise harm to protected seabird colonies, forage fish stocks, and the Special Protection Areas around Grassholm and Skomer. It will also inform fisheries management by modelling displacement scenarios and bycatch shifts. The work is applied—it directly addresses consenting risk and the need for compensatory conservation measures—but it also advances fundamental understanding of how dynamic shelf-sea ecosystems respond to large-scale infrastructure.
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The rapid expansion of floating offshore wind (FLOW) necessitates a predictive understanding of ecological consequences (both positive and negative), while also highlighting the imperative for innovative management approaches amid marine spatial squeeze. FRONTLINE focuses on FLOW impacts in the seasonally stratified Celtic Sea, via impacts on ocean physics and fronts, with implications for top predators and ultimately, fisheries. A mechanistic understanding of FLOW consequences will in turn provide opportunities for informing sustainable FLOW development and operation, while helping to manage natural capital in our changing oceans. Ocean fronts occur where well-mixed and seasonally stratified water masses meet, providing hotspots for phytoplankton blooms which in turn directly regulate zooplankton, forage fish, apex predators (e.g. large fish, marine mammals, seabirds) and commercially valuable fisheries, while also playing an important role in climate cycling. However, despite their recognized importance, frontal habitats remain poorly studied and FLOW impacts (e.g. via infrastructure-induced mixing and turbine wake effects on stratification and front formation), are virtually unknown. Further, a global scarcity of in situ plankton data (diversity and biomass) impedes detailed assessments of bottom-up ocean ecosystem change. FRONTLINE aims to provide unprecedented insights into the effect of offshore renewables on physical and biological oceanography, as well as commercial capture fisheries, in dynamic shelf-sea ecosystems, targeting FLOW sites in the Celtic Sea as an example. Our project combines a variety of techniques and expertise. Using NERC's long-range autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with novel sensors, we will quantify dynamic ocean physics, biogeochemistry, phyto- and zooplankton biodiversity and abundance, and forage fish distributions in relation to fine-scale front characteristics, FLOW infrastructure, and changing climatic conditions. Concurrent and historical satellite-derived front mapping will be used to identify these important habitats and determine potential FLOW impacts allowing regional scalability for consideration of fronts as priority conservation sites for mitigating FLOW impacts. We will also integrate AUV-enabled passive acoustics, digital aerial surveys and long-term seabird tracking to dive deeply into how key ecosystem drivers, fronts and FLOW infrastructure collectively influence marine vertebrate abundance and diversity, their foraging success, and behaviour. Employing state-of-the-art sensors, we also aim to harness the unique ability of seabirds as 'animal oceanographers' and for delivering a bird's-eye view on turbine perception. This will help elucidate currently unknown seabird responses to non-static turbines in terms of collision (above and below water), displacement and cumulative impacts. Together with a better understanding of possible FLOW effects on foraging habitat, this will provide vital information on adverse effects on the integrity of multiple Special Protection Areas (e.g. Grassholm and Skomer) with relevance for understanding consenting risk and likely requirement for compensation measures. We will also use fine-scale fisheries information and stakeholder engagement to assess the impact of different FLOW displacement scenarios. This will enable us to determine the direct consequences for fisheries management and policy as well as the indirect effect on other marine life (e.g. via changes in bycatch or exploitation pressure). Finally, we will use all this information to assess how protection of frontal habitats might be suitable as protected areas for compensatory measures. Our combination of approaches will allow FRONTLINE to deliver new insights into ecosystem-level impacts of FLOW development, improve the evidence basis for quantifying ecological impacts and consenting risk, while offering new ways to promote nature recovery and sustainability.
Lilian Lieber (Co-Investigator)Michel Kaiser (Co-Investigator)Peter Miller (Co-Investigator)Stephen Votier (Principal Investigator)Tim Guilford (Co-Investigator)William Nimmo Smith (Co-Investigator)
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