Map of the study area with recorders positioned across the continental shelf and in the wind energy lease blocks.
Delaware, Maine, New Jersey, New York and Virginia are also eager to secure permits and to lease blocks from the federal government in waters beyond the three-mile limit of state control.
We illustrate our approach using historical seabird data from survey transects in the U.S. Atlantic Ocean Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), an area that has been divided into "lease blocks" for proposed offshore wind energy development.
For our power analysis, we examined whether discrete lease blocks within the region could be defined as hotspots (3 × mean abundance in the OCS) or coldspots (1/3 ×) for individual species within a given season.
Regulators may need to accept higher proportional effect sizes, combine species into groups, and/or broaden the spatial scale by combining lease blocks in order to determine optimal placement of wind farms.
Virginia was one of the first states to auction off lease blocks to energy companies and, as a result, we started to deploy our marine recorders in the area to collect baseline data.
Firms that lease blocks of apartments or, in some cases, entire buildings from developers and landlords and furnish them and equip them with everything from complete kitchens to high-speed Internet systems, are reporting more vacancies this year than last.
The current data set has the potential to inform biodiversity management in the GAB, including the design of an ecological monitoring program prior to oil and gas exploration, because it includes samples from within and immediately adjacent to the Great Australian Bight Australian Marine Park (GAB AMP) and six active lease blocks.
We then used the selected distribution and estimates of regional prevalence to calculate and map statistical power to detect hotspots and coldspots, and estimate the p-value from Monte Carlo significance tests that specific lease blocks are in fact hotspots or coldspots relative to regional average abundance.
