The Belgian monitoring programme on the environmental impacts of offshore wind farms

MARECO is coordinating the environmental monitoring program to assess the impact of Belgian offshore wind farms, WinMon.BE. Together with our partners Ghent University, INBO and ILVO, we assess the impacts onto the marine ecosystem and aim at revealing the processes behind these impacts. The first objective is tackled through basic monitoring, focusing on the resultant impact quantification, while the second monitoring objective is covered by the targeted or process monitoring, addressing the cause-effect relationships of selected impacts. The program is focusing on various aspects of the marine environment (i.e. underwater sound, hard substrate and soft sediment invertebrates and fish, (sea)birds, marine mammals, and bats), but equally so on the functioning of the ecosystem.