Developing an Experimental In Situ Floating Buoy to Investigate the Impacts of Future Floating Wind Farms

ABSTRACT Offshore wind farms are expanding rapidly in response to climate change. Along the French Mediterranean coastline, floating wind farms are favored, yet their environmental and socio‐economic impacts remain poorly understood. The EolBio project aims to provide insights by developing and deploying an instrumented buoy to evaluate the potential effect of offshore wind farms on the marine local environment. Located in the Northwestern Gulf of Lion (Mediterranean Sea), the buoy operated over a 3‐year period in the vicinity of the future floating wind farm, Eolmed. It integrates a suite of cutting‐edge sensors to continuously record physical, chemical, and biological parameters, enabling real‐time and long‐term environmental characterization. This device represents a novel robotic approach to ecosystem monitoring in offshore environments. The in situ collected data, in addition to characterizing the modifications generated by the introduction of a floating structure, serve as inputs for trophic ecosystem models to simulate the spatiotemporal dynamics of marine food webs under different wind farm scenarios. This modelling work aims to anticipate the ecological and socio‐economic consequences of floating offshore wind farms and help sustainable deployment strategies. Here, we present the design, deployment, and operational process of the EolBio buoy system, along with a methodological workflow combining laboratory analyses, artificial intelligence, and ecosystem modelling. This approach provides a unique framework for assessing the early impacts of offshore infrastructures on marine ecosystems and illustrates how instrumented buoys can play a central role in large‐scale environmental monitoring.