The U.S. east coast continental shelf has 1.7 million acres of federal bottom under lease for development of offshore wind energy installations, with plans underway for more than 1,500 foundations to be installed. The globally unprecedented scale of these wind farms has the potential to interact with existing coastal ocean users, with particular impacts anticipated for commercial fishing. Some commercial fishing sectors may benefit from enhanced fishing opportunities within wind farms, with farms acting as a fish aggregating structure that provides habitat for some species. Other fishing sectors may be excluded altogether due to gear and vessel constraints, and limitation of fishable bottom habitat. The commercial shellfish fisheries along the east coast are among the largest (by landed weight) and most valuable (by dockside value). These clam and scallop fisheries are also at the greatest risk of being negatively affected by offshore wind development because of their overlap with existing lease areas and the nature of the vessels and fishing gear used. The nature of these interactions will be discussed, along with some research that is ongoing to try to estimate the scale of the economic consequences to these fisheries if they are unable to fish in offshore wind areas.

Daphne Munroe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University. As a shellfish ecologist at the Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory, her research focuses on shellfish populaton dynamics and ecological interactions of shellfish fisheries and farming. She studied in Canada, earning a B.Sc. in Environmental Science at Simon Fraser University and a Ph.D. in Animal Science at the University of British Columbia. As a JSPS PostDoctoral Fellow, she spent nearly two years in Sapporo, Japan, studying intertidal community ecology at Hokkaido University, before returning to North America where she taught at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. At Rutgers University, her laboratory includes two master's students and two doctoral candidates whose research spans interactions of climate change and commercial shellfisheries and farming, with an emphasis on supporting sustainable food production in the coastal habitat.

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