Connectivity of Hard Substrate Assemblages in the North Sea CHASANS

The CHASANS Project will deliver improved larval connectivity models necessary to provide guidance on decommissioning and derogation of artificial structures in the North Sea.
Team expertise in epifaunal ecology, oceanographic modelling, and population genetics will be used to generate a multidisciplinary dataset to validate biologically realistic models of larval connectivity between sites in the North Sea. These models will be used to predict how networks of hard substrate in the North Sea function in the dispersal and metapopulation structure of marine epifauna.
NOC modelling will be based on the existing Scottish Shelf Model and Scottish Shelf Waters Reanalysis Service. The “offline” flow fields will feed the particle-tracking model runs to simulate the dispersal of planktonic individuals of the selected species (epifaunal community) from a set of Oil&Gas and wind platforms in the North Sea.