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      Assessing environmental impacts of offshore wind farms: lessons learned and recommendations for the future

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          Abstract

          Offshore wind power provides a valuable source of renewable energy that can help reduce carbon emissions. Technological advances are allowing higher capacity turbines to be installed and in deeper water, but there is still much that is unknown about the effects on the environment. Here we describe the lessons learned based on the recent literature and our experience with assessing impacts of offshore wind developments on marine mammals and seabirds, and make recommendations for future monitoring and assessment as interest in offshore wind energy grows around the world. The four key lessons learned that we discuss are: 1) Identifying the area over which biological effects may occur to inform baseline data collection and determining the connectivity between key populations and proposed wind energy sites, 2) The need to put impacts into a population level context to determine whether they are biologically significant, 3) Measuring responses to wind farm construction and operation to determine disturbance effects and avoidance responses, and 4) Learn from other industries to inform risk assessments and the effectiveness of mitigation measures. As the number and size of offshore wind developments increases, there will be a growing need to consider the population level consequences and cumulative impacts of these activities on marine species. Strategically targeted data collection and modeling aimed at answering questions for the consenting process will also allow regulators to make decisions based on the best available information, and achieve a balance between climate change targets and environmental legislation.

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          On Beyond BACI: Sampling Designs that Might Reliably Detect Environmental Disturbances

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            CALCULATING LIMITS TO THE ALLOWABLE HUMAN-CAUSED MORTALITY OF CETACEANS AND PINNIPEDS

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              Ecological impacts of wind energy development on bats: questions, research needs, and hypotheses

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Aquat Biosyst
                Aquat Biosyst
                Aquatic Biosystems
                BioMed Central
                2046-9063
                2014
                14 September 2014
                : 10
                : 8
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, 146 Williams Street, Solomons, MD 20688, USA
                [2 ]Marine Scotland Science, 375 Victoria Road, Aberdeen AB11 9DB, UK
                [3 ]Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Lighthouse Field Station, University of Aberdeen, George Street, Cromarty, Ross-shire IV11 8YJ, UK
                Article
                2046-9063-10-8
                10.1186/2046-9063-10-8
                4172316
                25250175
                c325853d-e58e-4d81-a979-f4580d857e9a
                Copyright © 2014 Bailey et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

                This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver ( http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

                History
                : 5 February 2014
                : 3 September 2014
                Categories
                Review

                Ecology
                marine mammals,seabirds,wind turbine,underwater noise,collision risk,human impacts,cumulative impact assessment,population consequences

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