Since 2020, the 238 km² eastern wind zone in the Belgian part of the North Sea has been fully operational . It contains 9 wind farms and accounts for a total capacity of 2.26 GW produced by 399 offshore wind turbines. From the delineation of the zone in 2005, a WinMon.BE monitoring program was imposed as part of the environmental permit. WinMon.BE aims to evaluate the impact of offshore wind farms on the marine ecosystem through basic monitoring and to uncover the processes behind these impacts through more targeted monitoring.
The focus of UGent within WinMon.BE is on the ecosystem component macrobenthos and for ILVO on epibenthos and demersal fish. The WinMon.BE program has strongly contributed to the construction of time series (2005-2023) for both components, i.e. macrobenthos (UGent) and epibenthos and fish (ILVO). In addition, WinMon.BE has also led to deeper insights to explain the observed effects in both ecosystem components.
The objective of the current contract is to achieve integration of the collected data sources and to summarize and present the obtained insights in a comprehensible way.