This week is Maine Fishermen’s Forum 2024. I have gotten the chance to present a poster that will introduce a project my advisor (Damian C. Brady) and myself have been funded to work to Maine’s fishing community. The project is funded through NOWRDC and looks to perform a front-end analysis to address issues of marine spatial co-existence between hypothetical floating offshore wind developments and commercial fishing operations by iteratively engaging with both fishermen and engineers.
Our role in the project as marine / fishery scientists is to actually conduct project scoping, semi-structured interviews and generate feedback on hypothetical floating offshore wind arrays from commercial fishermen operating in the Gulf of Maine lobster fishery. A second sub-contractor on the project (ROSA) will be working to develop array solutions with pelagic longline tuna/ HMS fishermen in the Central Atlantic. This will allow us to simultaneously develop separate suites of solutions one applied to a fixed gear and one applied to a mobile gear fishery.
Presenting the poster during the offshore wind day of the Forum will hopefully give us the chance to engage with fishermen actively participating in the offshore wind siting and development process in the Gulf of Maine and allow us to start working on finding spatial solutions that can improve industry co-existence.
