Conservation potential of offshore windfarms for epibenthic invertebrates and fish communities in a heavily used regional sea

The Southern North Sea (SNS) has become a hub for installation of offshore renewables (OWF). Until 2040 large proportions of the SNS seascape will host fixed marine infrastructure for offshore wind farms. In parallel, the European Union urges member states to implement spatially conservation policies, leading to a network of marine protected areas (MPA). In MPA and OWF, demersal trawling will be restricted or prohibited and thereby could provide refuge for epibenthic invertebrates and demersal fish. Here we analysed the potential of the MPA and OWF networks to protect these two species groups by analysing the overlap between species' core areas (CA) and MPA/OWF sites. We defined core areas (CA) of species distributions based on modelled distributions of 177 epibenthic invertebrate and fish species, of which we identified 19 species of conservation concern. We further used a spatial optimisation algorithm to identify the areal demand for two coverage targets for the 19 species of conservation concern (10% and 30%). A 10%-CA coverage for all but three out of 19 species of could be achieved within the existing MPA network, a 30%-coverage could be achieved for only 13 species. Including existing and OWF planned until 2040 could help to achieve a coverage of 10% for all 19 species and would at least a 25%-coverage for all 19 species. Our results demonstrate the potential to co-locate areas of human activities with conservation areas by applying species distribution models in combination with spatial optimization tools to support regional conservation targets.