Abstract
Rapid global expansion of ofshore wind farms, tidal, and wave technologies signifes a new era of renewable energy development. While a promising means to combat the impacts of climate change, such developments necessitate fne-scale monitoring of biological communities to determine impacts associated with construction, operation, and eventual decommission. Here, we evaluate the performance of a gridded, Innovasea Systems, Inc. fne-scale acoustic telemetry positioning system (FSPS, n=20 acoustic receivers) for tracking behaviors of diverse, temperate fsh assemblages in relation to a subsea cable route supporting the Ørsted ofshore wind development in coastal New York. We examined array performance through positioning error derived from receiver reference transmitters and tracked animals (n=260) comprising 17 species of teleost and elasmobranch. We evaluated the efects of environmental variables (temperature, tilt, noise, and depth), transmitter power, individual movement rates, and receiver loss on horizontal positioning error (HPE) and route mean squared error (RMSE). Across a 16-month deployment period, many positions were derived for Atlantic sturgeon (n=2,612), black sea bass (n=9,175), clearnose skate (n=10,306), summer founder (n=13,304), and little skate (n=15,186), suggesting that these species may serve as sentinel candidates for assessing behavioral changes following construction, operation, and decommission. We found that receivers placed at the boundary of the grid exhibited higher HPE and RMSE, however these errors did not signifcantly change despite large receiver losses (25%). Generalized Linear Models revealed that temperature, noise, tilt, and depth were often signifcant predictors of HPE and RMSE, however, a substantial amount of variance was not explained by the models (~70%). Average movement rates ranged from 1.1 m s −1 (common thresher shark) to 0.03 m s −1 (little skate and summer founder) but had minimal efects on positioning error. Finally, we observed that higher transmitter powers (158 dB) may lead to higher and more variable HPE values. Overall, these fndings provide new insight into the drivers of FSPS array performance and illustrate their broad utility for monitoring fsh behavior associated with ofshore marine developments