Evaluating Potential Impacts of Offshore Wind Development on Fishing Operations by Comparing Fine‐ and Coarse‐Scale Fishery‐Dependent Data Marine and Coastal Fisheries

Climate change will disrupt many aspects of the marine environment, with anticipated effects for half of northeast- ern U.S. fisheries. To mitigate effects of climate change, the United States has designated 90,650 km2(35,000 mi2)o f ocean for offshore wind energy development, but this growing industry could impact fisheries in the region. Hence, there is a need to measure the spatial distribution of fishing operations to support multiple goals, including spatial planning and compensatory mitigation. In the U.S. Northeast, National Oceanic and Atmospheric AdministrationFisheries developed fishing footprints previously by using logbooks. However, logbook footprints rely on coarse data: a single location, the center point of fishing trips reported in logbooks. Therefore, we evaluated bias in these logbook