October 15, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:
NOAA Fisheries has developed new tools and analyses that will help the public better understand fishing impacts associated with offshore wind development.
To help analyze how fishing operations may be impacted by offshore wind energy projects, NOAA Fisheries combined vessel logbook and dealer report data from 2008-2018 compared to current offshore wind energy project areas. We identified where and when fishing occurred relative to these areas and estimated landings and fishing revenue associated with each project area.
Based on this process, NOAA Fisheries developed reports of potential socioeconomic impacts from each offshore wind project area based on historic data. These reports include information on the amount of primary species landed, revenue associated with landings, gear types used, and communities affected by each offshore wind development project area. This will help estimate the potential impacts of such development on managed fisheries and associated fishing communities.
The public can access and download data used to generate these reports using a web-based tool developed by NOAA Fisheries. This tool allows users to access summary data based on species, gear, port, and state. Users can also conduct a customized query by filtering the data for several fields, including year, wind energy area, species, or fishery management plan.
Both the socioeconomic impact reports and data query tool are now available online. All data included in reports or available through the new web-based query tool have been aggregated, as necessary, to protect data confidentiality.