Offshore windfarms - monitoring impacts on the commercial fishing industry: good practice guidance

5 Conclusions

Effective monitoring is essential to understand the potential impacts that OWFs and other marine sectors may have on the commercial fishing industry. This Guidance has been produced in collaboration with key stakeholders, alongside an accompanying Rapid Literature Review (Appendix A) and a Dataset Analysis Report (Appendix B) in order to address the need for guidance around monitoring the impacts of OWFs on the commercial fishing industry (as well as other sectors, such as MPAs) within Scotland. This Guidance aimed towards closing the evidence gaps identified by the ScotMER Fish and Fisheries Receptor Group, ‘monitoring of commercial fishing activity in the vicinity of OWFs and cables’ (FF.03-2022) and the evidence gap identified by the Socio-Economic Receptor Group ‘how can we improve the monitoring and evaluation (comparing predicted against monitored impacts) of socio-economic impacts?’ (S.07-2022).

This Guidance provides a step-by-step process on planning and conducting commercial fisheries monitoring, including the ‘planning’ stages to formulate the monitoring plan and methodology, the ‘monitoring’ stages in relation to data collection, analysis and reporting and finally the ‘benchmarking’ stage to ensure the monitoring approach remains effective. These steps are also followed throughout a hypothetical Case Study to visualise the implementation of the guidance into a hypothetical example.

This Guidance represents a significant step forward in the standardisation of monitoring of the commercial fishing activity by OWFs and other sectors. Due to the ever-changing and evolving nature of the commercial fishing and offshore renewable industries, this Guidance will need to be regularly reviewed and updated in order to ensure its contents remain the best available practices.