Valuing conservation benefits of an offshore marine protected area

Increasing anthropogenic pressure in the offshore marine environment highlights the need for improved management and conservation of offshore ecosystems. This study scrutinises the applicability of a discrete choice experiment to value the expected benefits arising from the conservation of an offshore sandbank in UK waters. The valuation scenario refers to the UK part of the Dogger Bank, in the southern North Sea, and is based on real-world management options for fisheries, wind farms and marine protection currently under discussion for the site. It is assessed to what extent the general public perceive and value conservation benefits arising from an offshore marine protected area. The survey reveals support for marine conservation measures despite the general public's limited prior knowledge of current marine planning. Results further show significant values for an increase in species diversity, the protection of certain charismatic species and a restriction in the spread of invasive species across the site. Implications for policy and management with respect to commercial fishing, wind farm construction and nature conservation are discussed

Integrating methods for ecosystem service assessment and valuation: mixed methods or mixed messages?

A mixed-method approach was used to assess and value the ecosystem services derived from the Dogger Bank, an extensive shallow sandbank in the southern North Sea. Three parallel studies were undertaken that 1) identified and quantified, where possible, how indicators for ecosystem service provision may change according to two future scenarios, 2) assessed members of the public's willingness-to-pay for improvements to a small number of ecosystem services as a consequence of a hypothetical management plan, and 3) facilitated a process of deliberation that allowed members of the public to explore the uses of the Dogger Bank and the conflicts and dilemmas involved in its management. Each of these studies was designed to answer different and specific research questions and therefore contributes different insights about the ecosystem services delivered by the Dogger Bank. This paper explores what can be gained by bringing these findings together post hoc and the extent to which the different methods are complementary. Findings suggest that mixed-method research brings more understanding than can be gained from the individual approaches alone. Nevertheless, the choice of methods used and how these methods are implemented strongly affects the results obtained

The marine economy of the United Kingdom

The marine and coastal environment is an important economic asset in the UK, and there is a need for greater information about marine economic activities for the purposes of marine management and policy. However, due to the difficulties of quantifying some marine sectors and separating them from terrestrial activities, the current size and structure of the marine economy is unknown. This paper defines a systematic approach to quantifying the UK marine economy, aiming to capture all activities in the market economy that occur within and depend upon UK marine and coastal environments, and estimates its contribution to the UK economy as a whole. The approach draws on previous research in this area and links sectors used in marine planning with the methodologies used in national accounts. The results suggest that the marine economy contributes double the amount of previous estimates to the UK economy. Changes in the structure of the marine economy, partly due to the expansion of offshore wind energy, may affect its economic contribution. The results also show that marine and coastal leisure and recreation sectors, which were previously thought to have a small economic contribution, are the second largest sector in the UK marine economy and account for the largest number of jobs. By disaggregating the economic sectors, the approach used here can underpin a marine natural capital approach, enabling economic activities to be linked with aspects of marine natural capital

Editorial: Bridging the gap between policy and science in assessing the health status of marine ecosystems

Human activities,both established and emerging, increasingly affect the provision of marine ecosystem services that deliver societal and economic benefits. Monitoring the status of marine ecosystems and determining how human activities change their capacity to sustain benefits for society requires an evidence-based Integrated Ecosystem Assessment approach that incorporates knowledge of ecosystem functioning and services).Although,there are diverse methods to assess the status of individual ecosystem components, none assesses the health of marine ecosystems holistically, integrating information from multiple ecosystem components. Similarly,while acknowledging the availability of several methods to measure single pressures and assess their impacts, evaluation of cumulative effects of multiple pressures remains scarce.Therefore,an integrative assessment requires us to first understand the response of marine ecosystems to human activities and their pressures and then develop innovative, cost-effective monitoring tools that enable collection of data to assess the health status of large marine areas. Conceptually, combining this knowledge of effective monitoring methods with cost-benefit analyses will help identify appropriate management measures to improve environmental status economically and efficiently. The European project DEVOTES (DEVelopment Of innovative Tools for understanding marine biodiversity and assessing good Environmental Status) specifically addressed these topics in order to support policymakers and managers in implementing the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive. Here, we synthesize our main innovative findings, placing these within the context of recent wider research, and identifying gaps and the major future challenges

Assessing costs and benefits of measures to achieve good environmental status in European regional seas: challenges, opportunities, and lessons learnt

The EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) requires Member States to assess the costs and benefits of Programmes of Measures (PoMs) put in place to ensure that European marine waters achieve Good Environmental Status by 2020. An interdisciplinary approach is needed to carry out such an assessment whereby economic analysis is used to evaluate the outputs from ecological analysis that determines the expected effects of such management measures. This paper applies and tests an existing six-step approach to assess costs and benefits of management measures with potential to support the overall goal of the MSFD and discusses a range of ecological and economic analytical tools applicable to this task. Environmental cost-benefit analyses are considered for selected PoMs in three European case studies: Baltic Sea (Finland), East Coast Marine Plan area (UK), and the Bay of Biscay (Spain). These contrasting case studies are used to investigate the application of environmental cost-benefit analysis (CBA) including the challenges, opportunities and lessons learnt from using this approach. This paper demonstrates that there are opportunities in applying the six-step environmental CBA framework presented to assess the impact of PoMs. However, given demonstrated limitations of knowledge and data availability, application of other economic techniques should also be considered (although not applied here) to complement the more formal environmental CBA approach

Molecular Diversity of Fungal Phylotypes Co-Amplified Alongside Nematodes from Coastal and Deep-Sea Marine Environments

Nematodes and fungi are both ubiquitous in marine environments, yet few studies have investigated relationships between these two groups. Microbial species share many well-documented interactions with both free-living and parasitic nematode species, and limited data from previous studies have suggested ecological associations between fungi and nematodes in benthic marine habitats. This study aimed to further document the taxonomy and distribution of fungal taxa often co-amplified from nematode specimens. A total of 15 fungal 18S rRNA phylotypes were isolated from nematode specimens representing both deep-sea and shallow water habitats; all fungal isolates displayed high pairwise sequence identities with published data in Genbank (99–100%) and unpublished high-throughput 454 environmental datasets (>95%). BLAST matches indicate marine fungal sequences amplified in this study broadly represent taxa within the phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, and several phylotypes showed robust groupings with known taxa in phylogenetic topologies. In addition, some fungal phylotypes appeared to be present in disparate geographic habitats, suggesting cosmopolitan distributions or closely related species complexes in at least some marine fungi. The present study was only able to isolate fungal DNA from a restricted set of nematode taxa; further work is needed to fully investigate the taxonomic scope and function of nematode-fungal interactions

Bridging the gap between policy and science in assessing the health status of marine ecosystems

Human activities, both established and emerging, increasingly affect the provision of marine ecosystem services that deliver societal and economic benefits. Monitoring the status of marine ecosystems and determining how human activities change their capacity to sustain benefits for society requires an evidence-based Integrated Ecosystem Assessment approach that incorporates knowledge of ecosystem functioning and services). Although, there are diverse methods to assess the status of individual ecosystem components, none assesses the health of marine ecosystems holistically, integrating information from multiple ecosystem components. Similarly, while acknowledging the availability of several methods to measure single pressures and assess their impacts, evaluation of cumulative effects of multiple pressures remains scarce. Therefore, an integrative assessment requires us to first understand the response of marine ecosystems to human activities and their pressures and then develop innovative, cost-effective monitoring tools that enable collection of data to assess the health status of large marine areas. Conceptually, combining this knowledge of effective monitoring methods with cost-benefit analyses will help identify appropriate management measures to improve environmental status economically and efficiently. The European project DEVOTES (DEVelopment Of innovative Tools for understanding marine biodiversity and assessing good Environmental Status) specifically addressed t hese topics in order to support policy makers and managers in implementing the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive. Here, we synthesize our main innovative findings, placing these within the context of recent wider research, and identifying gaps and the major future challenges