Impact of human activities on benthic biotopes and species

Executive Summary 1. The Marine Life Information Network (MarLIN) has been developed since 1998. Defra funding has supported a core part of its work, the Biology and Sensitivity Key Information Sub-programme. This report relates to Biology and Sensitivity work for the period 2001-2004. 2. MarLIN Biology and Sensitivity research takes information on the biology of species to identify the likely effects of changing environmental conditions linked to human activities on those species. In turn, species that are key functional, key structural, dominant, or characteristic in a biotope (the habitat and its associated species) are used to identify biotope sensitivity. Results are displayed over the World Wide Web and can be accessed via a range of search tools that make the information of relevance to environmental management. 3. The first Defra contract enabled the development of criteria and methods of research, database storage methods and the research of a wide range of species. A contract from English Nature and Scottish Natural Heritage enabled biotopes relevant to marine SACs to be researched. 4. Defra funding in 2001-2004 has especially enabled recent developments to be targeted for research. Those developments included the identification of threatened and declining species by the OSPAR Biodiversity Committee, the development of a new approach to defining sensitivity (part of the Review of Marine Nature Conservation), and the opportunity to use Geographical Information Systems (GIS) more effectively to link survey data to MarLIN assessments of sensitivity. 5. The MarLIN database has been developed to provide a resource to 'pick-and-mix' information depending on the questions being asked. Using GIS, survey data that provides locations for species and biotopes has been linked to information researched by MarLIN to map the likely sensitivity of an area to a specified factor. Projects undertaken for the Irish Sea pilot (marine landscapes), in collaboration with CEFAS (fishing impacts) and with the Countryside Council for Wales (oil spill response) have demonstrated the application of MarLIN information linked to survey data in answering, through maps, questions about likely impacts of human activities on seabed ecosystems. 6. GIS applications that use MarLIN sensitivity information give meaningful results when linked to localized and detailed survey information (lists of species and biotopes as point source or mapped extents). However, broad landscape units require further interpretation. 7. A new mapping tool (SEABED map) has been developed to display data on species distributions and survey data according to search terms that might be used by an environmental manager. 8. MarLIN outputs are best viewed on the Web site where the most up-to-date information from live databases is available. The MarLIN Web site receives about 1600 visits a day. 9. The MarLIN approach to assessing sensitivity and its application to environmental management were presented in papers at three international conferences during the current contract and a 'touchstone' paper is to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Hydrobiologia. The utility of MarLIN information for environmental managers, amongst other sorts of information, has been described in an article in Marine Pollution Bulletin. 10. MarLIN information is being used to inform the identification of potential indicator species for implementation of the Water Framework Directive including initiatives by ICES. 11. Non-Defra funding streams are supporting the updating of reviews and increasing the amount of peer review undertaken; both of which are important to the maintenance of the resource. However, whilst MarLIN information is sufficiently wide ranging to be used in an 'operational' way for marine environmental protection and management, new initiatives and the new biotopes classification have introduced additional species and biotopes that will need to be researched in the future. 12. By the end of the contract, the Biology and Sensitivity Key Information database contained full Key Information reviews on 152 priority species and 117 priority biotopes, together with basic information on 412 species; a total of 564 marine benthic species.

Putting meaning into NETMAR – the open service network for marine environmental data

The open service network for marine environmental data (NETMAR) project uses semantic web technologies in its pilot system which aims to allow users to search, download and integrate satellite, in situ and model data from open ocean and coastal areas. The semantic web is an extension of the fundamental ideas of the World Wide Web, building a web of data through annotation of metadata and data with hyperlinked resources. Within the framework of the NETMAR project, an interconnected semantic web resource was developed to aid in data and web service discovery and to validate Open Geospatial Consortium Web Processing Service orchestration. A second semantic resource was developed to support interoperability of coastal web atlases across jurisdictional boundaries. This paper outlines the approach taken to producing the resource registry used within the NETMAR project and demonstrates the use of these semantic resources to support user interactions with systems. Such interconnected semantic resources allow the increased ability to share and disseminate data through the facilitation of interoperability between data providers. The formal representation of geospatial knowledge to advance geospatial interoperability is a growing research area. Tools and methods such as those outlined in this paper have the potential to support these efforts.

Can the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) be used to infer sardine diet?

Knowledge on the impact of climate variability in the diet of planktivorous fish is limited by the laborious work involved in stomach content analysis, impractical for large scale studies. Routine measurements of plankton such as the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey provide valuable information of the temporal variation of phyto- and zooplankton prey availability for higher trophic levels. Sardines are a world-wide distributed and commercially important planktivorous fish, at the basis of the pelagic marine food web. Being predominantly non-selective filter-feeders, their diets closely correspond to the water plankton species and a significant relationship was recently found between Sardina pilchardus feeding intensity and remotely sensed chlorophyll alpha . Data of sardine stomach prey composition and CPR were obtained during 2003 for the same location off the west coast of Portugal, an area characterised by strong seasonality of plankton abundance and composition, mainly governed by upwelling events. Phyto- and zooplankton prey in sardine stomachs were identified to the lowest possible taxa and their numerical and volumetric abundance was registered, as well as their contribution to the prey carbon content. The seasonal variation of the abundance and composition of sardine diet was then compared to the abundance and composition of the water plankton obtained with the CPR at the same time and for the same area where the fish were collected, in order to evaluate if CPR data can be used to proxy sardine prey availability and diet composition at large temporal scales.