New wave of marine work
JNCC’s Marine teams are expanding into new areas of work. In
the last issue of
Nature News you read about the Marine
and Coastal Access Bill, and the requirement it brings for the
establishment of a network of Marine
Protected Areas. As a consequence of this Bill and recent
European marine legislation, the group formerly known as ‘Marine
Habitats Team’ has expanded, and adopted a new name to reflect its
three key areas of work – ‘Marine Ecosystems Team’.
Monitoring and surveillance
A major new challenge for staff in
Peterborough and Aberdeen is to develop a Marine Biodiversity
Monitoring and Surveillance Strategy, and to implement an
integrated programme of survey. JNCC is currently running a project
with Natural England covering UK offshore marine areas and English
territorial waters, which is funded by Defra. Discussions are
underway about whether the project might be extended to cover all
UK waters. The project includes monitoring requirements for
offshore Natura 2000 sites. At this stage no decisions have been
made about the monitoring and surveillance of other Marine
Protected Areas.
JNCC’s intention is that the Strategy will
provide a framework for existing and future monitoring and
surveillance. These activities will produce a picture of the
condition of marine biodiversity that will be used to achieve the
vision for ‘clean, healthy, safe, productive and biologically
diverse’ seas as set out in Safeguarding our Seas in May
2002.
This work is driven by the monitoring
requirements of the EU Habitats and Birds Directives, and those
expected to emerge for the Marine Strategy Framework Directive
(MSFD), the first European Directive covering all Member States’
waters. This ambitious UK monitoring and surveillance strategy will
also contribute to UK obligations as a contracting party to the
OSPAR Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the
African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement.
Mapping and Impacts
A sampling strategy for monitoring seabed
habitats will be based on existing knowledge of their distribution
and quality. Amazingly, available habitat maps derived from survey
data cover just 10% of the UK continental shelf, mainly limited to
waters within 12 nautical miles of the coast. In terms of total
surface area, imagine using a map of Wales to carry out a UK-wide
assessment. JNCC needs to fill gaps by predicting broadscale seabed
habitats from physical variables, such as depth and type of seabed
sediment. With the foundations of the predictive approach laid by
the INTERREG-funded MESH project and the UKSeaMap project, JNCC is
now launching a project to enhance our broadscale maps. Funding for
this work is provided by contributions made by the UKSeaMap project
consortium. The resulting map will be made available to the
regional Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) projects in late 2009, as
described in the last issue of Nature News, to help
develop their recommendations for regional MCZ networks.
Broadscale maps are also in great demand at a
European scale. JNCC has been contracted by the European Commission
to lead the EUSeaMap project, which began in spring 2009 and will
develop harmonised seabed habitat maps for European waters. In the
North Sea, Celtic Seas and Baltic Sea, outputs from the MESH
project and a similar Baltic project (BALANCE) form a sound
starting point for the work. This contract is funded by
Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, with the
primary aim to support the requirements of MSFD, specifically the
initial assessments that all Member States must undertake in
2012.
JNCC also wants to know where habitats are
threatened by human activities. This requires spatial information
about such activities, from which standardised maps of pressures
can be derived. The same pressure can have a different impact on
different seabed habitats, dependent on the sensitivity of habitats
to particular pressures. JNCC will bring together recent work in
this area, carried out on behalf of Defra, and use this to direct
fieldwork under the 
monitoring and
surveillance project.
Assessing the status of marine
biodiversity
JNCC staff are leading the preparation of four
chapters (on seabed habitats, marine birds, turtles and cetaceans)
for the Healthy and Biologically Diverse Seas status
report. This report will provide a comprehensive overview of the
status of marine species, habitats and ocean processes across UK
waters. The findings from this, and two other expert reports, will
contribute to Charting Progress 2, due for publication in
May 2010.
In preparing the seabed habitats chapter, JNCC organised a
workshop in November 2008, bringing together experts from statutory
agencies, academia, consultancies, NGOs and others. These experts
assessed the impact of human activities on seabed habitats in each
of the UK’s Regional Seas. For the first time we have been able
systematically to assess the entire seabed area, using a
methodology developed by researchers at the University of Liverpool
and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science
(Cefas).
The experience and evidence gained in preparing the
chapters for Charting Progress 2 have also been used in
the assessment of the status of species and habitats in the
north-east Atlantic OSPAR area. JNCC helped to organise a workshop,
held in Utrecht in February 2009, which adopted a similar
methodology to that used in the UK; the results of the workshop
from the biodiversity contribution to the OSPAR Quality Status
Report (QSR), to be published in 2010.
Apart from their inherent importance,
Charting Progress 2 and the QSR are relevant as a test-bed
for the upcoming Initial Assessments for the Marine Strategy
Framework Directive, due in 2012. The assessment methodology
highlighted areas for further development and information gaps.
Better data collected under the monitoring and surveillance
strategy will enhance the robustness of these assessments in the
future.
Natalie Coltman
Marine Mapping and Impacts Manager
Tel: +44 (0)1733 866914
Email: