WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:16.049 --> 00:00:22.090 We are mapping and determining where critical fish habitat is in a particular area off the 00:00:22.090 --> 00:00:27.160 coast of North Carolina in what’s known as a Wind Energy Call Area. It’s an area 00:00:27.160 --> 00:00:33.430 that the government agency, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (or BOEM), has designated 00:00:33.430 --> 00:00:39.430 as a place where future wind energy development may occur. So, it’s a place where they would, 00:00:39.430 --> 00:00:42.350 perhaps, put turbines in the offshore environment. 00:00:42.350 --> 00:00:47.280 The Wind Energy Area that we’ve been working in is off of Wilmington, North Carolina. It’s 00:00:47.280 --> 00:00:51.949 about fifteen miles off of Cape Fear. It’s one of three wind energy areas off North Carolina. 00:00:51.949 --> 00:00:57.230 There’s another that is just west of Wilmington-East, called Wilmington-West. And then, there’s 00:00:57.230 --> 00:01:02.739 a third area off the northern Outer Banks that is called Kitty Hawk. 00:01:02.739 --> 00:01:07.929 We are looking for habitat that’s what we call hardbottom. These are areas that are 00:01:07.929 --> 00:01:14.280 either consolidated sediment or exposed outcroppings of rock. Sometimes they are man-made structures, 00:01:14.280 --> 00:01:21.080 such as historic shipwrecks, and these areas form important habitat for fish, as well as 00:01:21.080 --> 00:01:26.610 critters that you sometimes see on coral reefs, so, invertebrates and macroalgae. Some of 00:01:26.610 --> 00:01:32.770 them are these incredible ledge features that are up to 30 feet or 10 meters tall. Other 00:01:32.770 --> 00:01:39.000 ones are kindof like a parking lot; they’re flat and don’t have much relief. 00:01:39.610 --> 00:01:45.050 Hardbottom sites are critical habitat for fish because they function as places where the fishes can 00:01:45.050 --> 00:01:50.739 forage. They can seek refuge from predators in the nooks and crannies in these habitats. 00:01:50.739 --> 00:01:55.929 They’re also something that we call nearshore connectivity corridors, where fish can move 00:01:55.929 --> 00:02:01.110 from areas in the estuaries to offshore reefs using these as stepping stones. 00:02:02.600 --> 00:02:06.800 I think that people would be amazed at the types of habitats we have offshore of North 00:02:06.800 --> 00:02:11.560 Carolina. They vary from the tropical reefs, or what seem like tropical reefs, to vast 00:02:11.560 --> 00:02:16.200 tracks of sand that don’t appear to host any biological life whatsoever, what we might 00:02:16.200 --> 00:02:20.670 call an ocean desert. What impresses us greatly when working offshore of North Carolina are 00:02:20.670 --> 00:02:26.170 the diversity of fishes that occupy the hardbottom habitats. Those are the ones that we think 00:02:26.170 --> 00:02:30.340 might be some of the more sensitive habitats offshore. And, we have very little understanding 00:02:30.340 --> 00:02:34.430 of where those habitats are located. Fishermen know where they are. They fish those areas 00:02:34.430 --> 00:02:37.620 all of the time, and we’ve been learning a great deal from the fishermen on where these 00:02:37.620 --> 00:02:42.370 habitats are located. That gives us a bit of information on where they are, but we still 00:02:42.370 --> 00:02:47.069 have a limited understanding of how these habitats are structured offshore. Are they 00:02:47.069 --> 00:02:51.530 clustered in one area, or are they randomly distributed across the entire coastline of North Carolina? 00:02:53.280 --> 00:02:57.850 We have a pretty good understanding of how these hardbottom habitats support the fish 00:02:57.850 --> 00:03:02.280 that are important to our economy and ecology. If BOEM is interested in reducing the potential 00:03:02.280 --> 00:03:08.140 environmental impacts from, say, developing a wind farm off our coast, we wish to conduct 00:03:08.140 --> 00:03:12.150 some studies to point them to where these habitats might occur, where these most sensitive 00:03:12.150 --> 00:03:16.650 areas might occur, so that those areas can be avoided in terms of development and potential 00:03:16.650 --> 00:03:17.890 environmental impact. 00:03:17.890 --> 00:03:21.990 What it comes down to is that we would love to get eyes in the water everywhere that we 00:03:21.990 --> 00:03:27.560 go offshore of North Caronia, and in 277,000 acres that would just be physically impossible, 00:03:27.560 --> 00:03:31.120 so we must use remote sensing tools to give us an image of what the seafloor looks like. 00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:35.180 Two of the ways that we did that in the early stages of this project were using sidescan 00:03:35.180 --> 00:03:42.120 sonar and multibeam sonar. Sidescan sonar gives us about a 300-meter swath or a thousand-foot 00:03:42.120 --> 00:03:48.120 swath of the seafloor that shows us the texture of the seafloor, how hard is the seafloor. 00:03:48.120 --> 00:03:52.080 It can show us different types of sediment or give us an indication of the type of sediment 00:03:52.080 --> 00:03:56.709 that are on the seafloor. The multibeam sonar, on the other hand, gives us an image of the 00:03:56.709 --> 00:04:01.900 topography or the relief of the seafloor. It gives us the elevation like you would see 00:04:01.900 --> 00:04:07.000 on a Google Earth map. We put those pieces together, and it gives us both the texture, 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:11.090 the hardness and roughness, and then the elevation of the seafloor, and that gives us an indication 00:04:11.090 --> 00:04:17.019 of the types of habitats that might occur. We then use divers to validate and ground-truth 00:04:17.019 --> 00:04:21.599 what the sonars are telling us. The imagery that we’re gathering using the sonar and 00:04:21.599 --> 00:04:26.410 from our divers are putting together a really interesting picture of what these habitats 00:04:26.410 --> 00:04:31.069 look like from a digital sense and then helping us interpret from a biological sense, using 00:04:31.069 --> 00:04:34.990 our eyes, what those habitats are really like. 00:04:34.990 --> 00:04:40.139 One of the things that we do while underwater on our diving surveys is count the fish. And, 00:04:40.139 --> 00:04:46.330 we set out this 30-meter long transect tape. It is basically an underwater measuring tape, 00:04:46.330 --> 00:04:51.360 and we swim along that tape and count the fish that we see. We record what species they 00:04:51.360 --> 00:04:57.749 are; we estimate their length, and we can use that information to identify which habitats 00:04:57.749 --> 00:05:01.249 are the most important fish habitat. 00:05:01.249 --> 00:05:05.330 In coral reef systems, it’s well known that when you have a more structurally complex 00:05:05.330 --> 00:05:10.949 habitat, the fish diversity, the abundance or the number of fish, will increase. But, 00:05:10.949 --> 00:05:17.449 nobody knows if that relationship is the same here off the coast of North Carolina. And, 00:05:17.449 --> 00:05:24.120 if we can understand whether these complex habitats may be better fish habitat, we can 00:05:24.120 --> 00:05:30.979 use that to identify which areas are most critical to conserve and protect in the long run. 00:05:32.120 --> 00:05:38.020 Hardbottoms are really important for the residents of North Carolina because they support so 00:05:38.029 --> 00:05:44.219 many fish that we depend on, both for recreational and commercial fisheries. They also support 00:05:44.219 --> 00:05:52.749 a vibrant recreational diving community and tourism. And, overall, they are really important 00:05:52.749 --> 00:05:58.120 for the health of our ecosystems because they provide nursery habitat, places where fish 00:05:58.120 --> 00:06:04.219 can eat or forage, places where they can seek refuge, and also corridors to help them move 00:06:04.219 --> 00:06:11.129 from inshore to offshore locations. So because they perform all of these functions, they 00:06:11.129 --> 00:06:13.610 are really important for us to conserve and protect.