Modeling Small Scale Impacts of Multi-Purpose Platforms: An Ecosystem Approach

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Electronic versions

Documents

DOI

  • Natalia Serpetti
    Scottish Association for Marine Science
  • Stephen Benjamins
    Scottish Association for Marine Science
  • Stevie Brain
    Scottish Association for Marine Science
  • Maurizio Collu
    University of Strathclyde
  • Benjamin Harvey
    University of St. Andrews
  • Adam Hughes
    Scottish Association for Marine Science
  • Denise Risch
    Scottish Association for Marine Science
  • Johanna Heymens
    Scottish Association for Marine Science
  • Sophia Rosinski
    University of the Highlands and Islands
  • James Waggitt
  • Ben Wilson
    Scottish Association for Marine Science
Aquaculture and marine renewable energy are two expanding sectors of the Blue Economy in Europe. Assessing the long-term environmental impacts in terms of eutrophication and noise is a priority for both the EU Water Framework Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and cumulative impacts will be important for the Maritime Spatial Planning under the Integrated Maritime Policy. With the constant expansion of aquaculture production, it is expected that farms might be established further offshore in more remote areas, as high-energy conditions offer an opportunity to generate more power locally using Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) devices. A proposed solution is the co-location of MRE devices and aquaculture systems using Multi-Purpose Platforms (MPPs) comprising offshore wind turbines (OWTs) that will provide energy for farm operations as well as potentially shelter the farm. Disentangling the impacts, conflicts and synergies of MPP elements on the surrounding marine ecosystem is challenging. Here we created a high-resolution spatiotemporal Ecospace model of the West of Scotland, in order to assess impacts of a simple MPP configuration on the surrounding ecosystem and how these impacts can cascade through the food web. The model evaluated the following specific ecosystem responses: (i) top-down control pathways due to distribution changes among top-predators (harbor porpoise, gadoids and seabirds) driven by attraction to the farming sites and/or repulsion/killing due to OWT operations; (ii) bottom-up control pathways due to salmon farm activity providing increasing benthic enrichment predicated by a fish farm particle dispersal model, and sediment nutrient fluxes to the water column by early diagenesis of organic matter (recycled production). Weak responses of the food-web were found for top-down changes, whilst the results showed high sensitivity to increasing changes of bottom-up drivers that cascaded through the food-web from primary producers and detritus to pelagic and benthic consumers, respectively. We assessed the sensitivity of the model to each of these impacts and the cumulative effects on the ecosystem, discuss the capabilities and limitations of the Ecospace modeling approach as a potential tool for marine spatial planning and the impact that these results could have for the Blue Economy and the EU’s New Green Deal.
Original languageEnglish
Article number694013
JournalFrontiers in Marine Science
Volume8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 Jul 2021

Total downloads

No data available
View graph of relations