DFO MS Thesis Defense "Impacts to stock abundance indices due to offshore wind development-driven changes to fishery-independent survey effort" by Angelia Miller
Department of Fisheries Oceanography
"Impacts to stock abundance indices due to offshore wind development-driven changes to fishery-independent survey effort"
By: Angelia Miller
Advisor: Dr. Gavin Fay (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth)
Committee members
Dr. Steven X. Cadrin (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth), and Dr. Catherine Foley (NOAA NEFSC)
Tuesday May 20th, 2025
1:30 PM
SMAST East 101-103
836 S. Rodney French Blvd, New Bedford
and via Zoom
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 whose data 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 efforts due to the spatial conflict arising from offshore wind energy development. My thesis aims to quantify the impacts of preclusion to monitoring and operations and understand changes to species distributions and abundances within wind areas, which could jointly affect downstream data products, such as stock abundance indices, and fisheries management advice. The first phase of my study serves as a proxy for expected losses for comparison to my species distribution modeling and suggests that, when accounting for reduced trawl samples, annual estimates of relative abundance are lower than those calculated when including all samples. Additionally, when compared to a random, null model of effort reduction, preclusion of wind areas resulted in lower abundance estimates. Applying summer flounder (Paralichthys dentatus) and Atlantic mackerel (Scomber scombrus) as two case study species, I fit a spatiotemporal generalized linear mixed effects model (GLMM), generate simulated survey data, and calculate indices of abundance and population trends to compare survey outcomes with and without trawl samples inside proposed wind development areas in the second phase of my study. I employed the species distribution operating model to examine changes in fish density under assumed changes in species productivity, and to survey catch rates, as a function of offshore wind development. I found that the loss of samples inside wind areas has a substantial impact on estimates of abundance indices and population trends. This study contributes directly to implementation of the Federal Survey Mitigation Strategy for the Northeast U.S. Region (Action 3.2.2) 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.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://umassd.zoom.us/j/92249874120
Note: Meeting passcode required, email contact below to receive
For additional information, please contact Callie Rumbut at c.rumbut@umassd.edu
SMAST East 101-103
: 836 S. Rodney French Blvd., New Bedford MA 02744
Callie Rumbut
c.rumbut@umassd.edu
https://umassd.zoom.us/j/92249874120