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The increase in global wind power installations has also increased the wind turbine density in wind farms. This has made the wake interactions between neighbouring turbines more significant and difficult to describe. Understanding wakes is important to predict the energy production and assess their environmental impacts. Although existing wake description methods can predict the average wind turbine wake under a high wind turbine density, they are unable to identify the wake boundary with an acceptable accuracy and computational cost. Consequently, the role of wake boundaries in modern wind farms has become unclear. To deal with this problem, this paper presents a comprehensive discussion on wind turbine wakes, especially the role of boundary identification in the wind farm planning stage. After a review of existing methods, an approach based on a newly derived mathematical formulation of the velocity field is proposed. Lidar-based field measurements and large-eddy simulations along with actuator line model-based numerical simulations were used to compare different wake boundary identification methods. The results show that the new approach is computationally cost-effective with a 5% increase in accuracy. The new approach also offers significant advantages as wake boundaries become increasingly complex. • The importance of wind turbine wake boundary identification is discussed. • Various wake boundary identification methods are compared for different purposes. • A cost-effective method is presented and demonstrated for its advantages. • The more complicated the wakes, the easier the new method's advantage is shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]