Harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) and wind farms: a case study in the Dutch North Sea

By M. Scheidat, Jakob Tougaard, S. Brasseur, J. Carstensen, Tamara van Polanen Petel, J. Teilmann, P. Reijnders. 2011

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rapid increase in development of offshore wind energy in European waters has raised concern for the possible environmental impacts of wind farms. We studied whether harbour porpoise occurrence has been affected by the presence of the Dutch offshore wind farm Egmond aan Zee. This was done by studying acoustic activity of porpoises in the wind farm and in two reference areas using stationary acoustic monitoring (with T-PODs) prior to construction (baseline: June 2003 to June 2004) and during normal operation of the wind farm (operation: April 2007 to April 2009). The results show a strong seasonal pattern, with more activity recorded during winter months. There was also an overall increase in acoustic activity from baseline to operation, in line with a general increase in porpoise abundance in Dutch waters over the last decade. The acoustic activity was significantly higher inside the wind farm than in the reference areas, indicating that the occurrence of porpoises in this area increased as well. The reasons of this apparent preference for the wind farm area are not clear. Two possible causes are discussed: an increased food availability inside the wind farm (reef effect) and/or the absence of vessels in an otherwise heavily trafficked part of the North Sea (sheltering effect).

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a852b0958e21ce0830faef871299085ce51a8571

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

Jakob Mann

In Ecology

Citations in the corpus

Environmental impact of wind energy (2013, background): “…et al 2011) and its impact on human health (Bolin et al 2011), over impacts on the marine ecosystem (Lindeboom et al 2011, Dähne et al 2013, Scheidat et al 2011, Teilmann and Carstensen 2012) to impacts on the atmosphere either through direct changes of wind speed and turbulent fluxes of…”
Effects of pile-driving on harbour porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) at the first offshore wind farm in Germany (2013, background): “…analysis of short-term reactions (Carstensen et al 2006, Tougaard et al 2009, Brandt et al 2011) as well as long-term changes in habitat use (Scheidat et al 2011) it is not yet clear how to link those results to the status of the population and what would be the influence of a simultaneous…”
Short-term ecological effects of an offshore wind farm in the Dutch coastal zone; a compilation (2011, methodology): “The results showed that relatively more porpoises are found in the wind farm area compared to the two reference areas (Scheidat et al 2011).”