Report of the Workshop on Effects of Offshore Windfarms on Marine Benthos (WKEOMB)

The workshop ‘Effects of offshore wind farms on marine benthos – facilitating a closer international collaboration’ was held at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany. The workshop was attended by 19 experts, representing seven countries (Belgium, Germany, Estonia, France, Po-land, United Kingdom, Netherlands). Valuable remote contributions to the workshop were received from Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The workshop was chaired by Jennifer Dannheim (AWI), Steven Degraer (Royal Belgium Institute of Natural Sci-ence, MUMM, Belgium) and Lars Gutow (AWI). Offshore wind farms will most likely become one of the largest-scale anthropogenic activities in our coastal systems. Thus understanding the effects of offshore wind farms on the benthic system is of high priority. Over the last decade, benthic ecolo-gists have improved their knowledge on understanding how wind turbines affect the ecological functioning of benthos. This workshop aims at bringing together, for the first time, scientists from various countries that work on or are interested in this topic in order to exchange knowledge of the state of the art between experts, to condense knowledge on wind farm effects, to identify possible redundancies in monitoring programs, and to evaluate where to go in wind farm-benthos science, i.e. to identify potential knowledge gaps.