The case for co-locating offshore wind parks and nature reserves

 In 2014, marine scientists at the University of St Andrews in Scotland undertook a pioneering study to examine the behavior of gray and harbor seals in the North Sea’s sprawling wind parks. From onshore laboratories, the researchers followed seals marked with GPS tags in the vicinity of wind farms off the Dutch and British coasts. Their findings astounded them: within the parks, seals swam in grid-like patterns from turbine to turbine, stopping regularly to feed around the masts.

One of the scientists, Dr. Deborah Russell of the Sea Mammal Research Unit of St Andrews, says, “This was the first evidence that marine mammals preferentially used an offshore manmade structure to forage.”

The Scottish team’s discovery that some sea life gravitates to wind-park waters to feed turned on its head the orthodoxy about offshore wind parks’ singularly deleterious impact on nature. For years, conservationists had accused sea-based wind turbines of killing birds, confusing dolphins, and crushing seafloor aquaculture. But the Scots’ research—since followed up on by scientists from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark—reveals that wind parks can protect and even nurture a range of marine life, including the likes of the European clawed lobster, brown crabs, and harbor porpoises as well as threatened species such as North Sea cod and gray seals.

“This is very positive,” says Frank Adam, a wind-power expert at the University of Rostock in Germany. “Wind parks are a protected place for fish, crustaceans, and other species.”