THE PROBLEM: Offshore windfarms will be developed at an accelerated schedule under fast-track plans to switch away from fossil fuels. With ever larger offshore windfarms, and the cumulative effects of climate change, we thus urgently need to understand the way the seabed is modified in response and how such changes affect the wider marine ecosystem. When natural currents in the sea deviate around the wind turbines or anchors, the forces acting on the bed enhance, making sediments move and stay in suspension. This reduces the clarity of the water and changes the shape and sediment composition of the seabed, with impacts stretching far beyond the object. The seabed supports ecosystems that deliver a wide range of services incl. fishing, carbon storage, aggregates and coastal protection. The climate crisis will stretch impacts even further and into coastal zones, as future storm waves and rising sea levels will alter the ways energy from the sea is transferred to the seabed. All these changes combined can have wide-reaching impacts for organisms that live on or in the seabed, potentially changing biodiversity (species richness) and the delivery of some of these ecosystem services. The impacts at the seabed extend through the food chain to the water column and beyond as seabed dwelling fish are consumed by seabirds and cetaceans. Aggregations of fish can be strongly associated to particular seabed properties. If displacement or mortality occurs amongst these important prey species, this has knock-on effects for the deep-diving predators that cannot afford to be less efficient in foraging for food, like the seabirds that are protected by legislation. During this pivotal time of energy transition and national security, it is of crucial importance to better understand and unlock the potential of the marine environment for a renewable energy transition with added benefits to the ecosystem. AIM: This proposal sets out a strategy to assess the seabed response to the combination of accelerated windfarm expansion and accelerated climate change, and to quantify the implications for (1) biodiversity, (2) ecosystem services, (3) habitats, and (4) interactions between seabird populations and their food. We ultimately seek to help identify opportunities that benefit the conservation of species and increase biodiversity around windfarms. We will help windfarm developers design their monitoring strategies long beyond the life-span of our project. SUMMARY OF METHODS AND OUTPUTS: Via a multi-proxy study using observations, laboratory experiments and models, we will assess and map, under different climate predictions, how the stresses on the bed will be modified by 2050, how the distribution of seabed habitats and biodiversity will change, and how that drives changes to ecosystem services and the foraging success of deep-diving seabirds. We will design relevant scenarios, where we consider offshore windfarm size, scour mitigation strategies, predator behaviour and the ecosystem's vulnerability to change due to the combined effect of accelerated windfarm expansion and climate change. We will use the Eastern Irish Sea area as case study, as it is the home of a variety of seabird species with specific predator-prey relationships, of diverse seabed types and of considerable windfarm expansion nearby existing windfarms. To help all developers of windfarms in the UK, UK-scale maps will be made of the vulnerability of the seabed to change, and a new seabird vulnerability index will be developed. Our quantification of how these processes from seabed to seabirds interact can directly inform/feed into existing and future decision support tools. We will provide a tool where stakeholders can run their own simulations anywhere around the UK and for any given model/data resolution to quantify uncertainty levels of bed stress caused by windfarms, with cascading effects of uncertainty in habitat and biodiversity distribution and ecosystem services.

Driven by ambitious, legally binding targets for increased use of renewable energy, the expansion of offshore wind energy has become a key policy issue in the UK, and is attracting substantial investment from businesses. However, the use of large areas of the sea for wind farms can impact on marine ecosystems and on the many species that depend on these ecosystems, from sandeels to seabirds, and the important services these ecosystems provide, such as fisheries and recreation. As a result, many stakeholders might be affected by new wind farms, including commercial, government, nature conservation and community interests. Depending on where wind farms are located, different trade-offs between these benefits will need to be made. Ecological researchers have developed oceanographic models that can predict how the addition of 100s of large gravity based windmills will change the movement and accumulation patterns of bottom sediment and in what locations there will be hydrographic changes sufficient to affect the amount of plankton (the base of the marine food chain) produced. From previous research, we can predict the consequential changes in the distributions of sandeels, seabirds and marine mammals. Economists and social scientists have developed ways of assimilating ecological evidence to assess the ecosystem services impacts on stakeholders of large scale changes, such as in agricultural practices (Bateman et al. 2013 Science 341:45-50). Together they evaluate how changes in ecosystem services in terrestrial settings are viewed socially, culturally, economically and legally. However, in the marine environment, and because of the infancy of large offshore developments, marine renewable energy industries do not currently have an established or standardised process to evaluate the ecological, economic and cultural trade-offs inherent in alternative locations of offshore windfarms. This project brings together leading ecological, economic, social-cultural, and legal experts from the University of Aberdeen, the Scottish Association for Marine Science, the James Hutton Institute and Marine Scotland Science with 3 marine renewable energy companies; Seagreen, Repsol & MainStream RP. Together, this group will co-develop a decision-support system to assess large scale changes in ecosystem services in the marine environment. Using a case study of the wider Firth of Forth, Scotland, where there are plans for a Marine Protected Area in the same location as the windfarms, these partners will bring together a wide range of stakeholders (fishing industry, marine wildlife NGOs, local community leaders and environmental businesses) to map out different types of evidence, discuss their different and shared values and evaluate different spatial wind farm scenarios to inform decisions. At the core of the projects there will be 2 workshops; the first of which uses the rich amount of existing data for this area to develop a common understanding of the social-ecological system. The 2nd will explore ecosystem service trade-offs under different wind turbine configuration scenarios. This project will facilitate the rare opportunity of providing the interaction needed to enhance business's and stakeholder's understanding of ecosystem services in the context of a real situation at just the right time for immediate implementation. The CORPORATES project will produce a user's guide on how to run this process, so that it can become a standardised tool for the industry. This can bring substantial benefits to industry, as business plans can be better aligned to different stakeholder interests and communal values, increasing support for plans, reducing the risk of conflict and improving the reputation of the company. The project will also help businesses take better account and understanding of the value of the many services that ecosystems provide us and the benefits they bring to human wellbeing, leading to more sustainable use of the marine environment.