Assessment of the Ecological Coherence of the UK's Marine
Assessment of the ecological coherence of the UK’s marine protected area network A report prepared for the Joint Links Louise Lieberknecht, Tom Mullier, Jeff Ardron June 2014 About this report This report was prepared for the Joint Links by Louise Lieberknecht (GoBe Consultants Ltd.), Tom Mullier (Marine Mapping Ltd.), and Jeff Ardron (PacMARA) in fulfilment of a contract to assess the ecological coherence of the UK’s MPA network, identify gaps in the network, and provide pragmatic recommendations for moving towards a more ecologically coherent MPA network in the UK. The report presents the key results of a series of spatial ecological coherence tests, and is presented alongside an accompanying Excel document containing detailed outputs and a series of PowerPoint slides summarising key findings. Suggested citation: Lieberknecht, L. M., Mullier, T. W., and Ardron, J. A. (2014) Assessment of the ecological coherence of the UK’s marine protected area network. A report prepared for the Joint Links. Acknowledgements Several people and organisations helpfully supplied information and spatial data used in this analysis. Amy Ridgeway and Mark Lewis from the JNCC supplied information on the JNCC’s on-going gap analysis for the MPA network in English and offshore Welsh waters, as well as the European Seabirds at Sea database. Ian Saunders at Natural England kindly shared database extraction tools to aid with the extraction of relevant data from the Marine Recorder database. Peter Miller at Plymouth Marine Laboratory provided seasonal thermal front data. Feedback, information and advice from the Joint Links project Steering Group helped to shape the analysis and report, and are gratefully acknowledged.
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