Feasibility Study on the Establishment of a Large Scale Inshore Resource Mapping Project

In 1999 the Irish Government allocated €27 million to survey all of Ireland’s territorial waters. The National Seabed Survey involves the acquisition and processing of 850,000sq.km of multibeam sonar swath bathymetry, sub-bottom seismic reflection, gravity, magnetic and ancillary geological and water column data in water depths of 50m to 4000m. The area is divided into Zone 3 (water depths 200m to 4000m), Zone 2 (50m to 200m) and Zone 1 (0m to 50m). By 2003, the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI) had completed Zone 3 data acquisition and the Marine Institute had mapped a large area offshore northwest Ireland (especially Donegal Bay) as part of its Zone 2 responsibilities. Mapping in Zone 2 will continue until 2006, by which time Ireland will be in possession of one of the most comprehensive seabed data sets in oceanic waters. During the planning of the National Seabed Survey, it was obvious that the mapping requirements for Zone 1 (0m to 50m) were more complex than those in deeper waters. This was because of the technical difficulties in mapping Ireland’s variable coastline, its economic importance and the diversity of potential stakeholder interests in Zone 1 waters. As a consequence, the Geological Survey of Ireland and the Marine Institute focused on mapping Zones 3 and 2 respectively, where data could be collected easily and rapidly in spite of the large area. In the meantime, the Marine Institute commissioned this feasibility study to cost and prioritise a comprehensive mapping programme for Zone 1 as the final phase in the Government’s commitment to map Ireland’s entire offshore resource.Funder: Marine InstituteThis project (Grant-aid Agreement No. DK/01/007) was carried out with the support of the Marine Institute and the Marine RTDI measure, Productive Sector Operational Programme, National Development Plan 2000-200

Marine Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning

Principali risultati del network europeo di eccellenza MARBE

Biological geography of the European seas: results from the MacroBen database

This study examines whether or not biogeographical and/or managerial divisions across the European seas can be validated using soft-bottom macrobenthic community data. The faunal groups used were: all macrobenthos groups, polychaetes, molluscs, crustaceans, echinoderms, sipunculans and the last 5 groups combined. In order to test the discriminating power of these groups, 3 criteria were used: (1) proximity, which refers to the expected closer faunal resemblance of adjacent areas relative to more distant ones; (2) randomness, which in the present context is a measure of the degree to which the inventories of the various sectors, provinces or regions may in each case be considered as a random sample of the inventory of the next largest province or region in a hierarchy of geographic scales; and (3) differentiation, which provides a measure of the uniqueness of the pattern. Results show that only polychaetes fulfill all 3 criteria and that the only marine biogeographic system supported by the analyses is the one proposed by Longhurst (1998). Energy fluxes and other interactions between the planktonic and benthic domains, acting over evolutionary time scales, can be associated with the multivariate pattern derived from the macrobenthos datasets. Third-stage multidimensional scaling ordination reveals that polychaetes produce a unique pattern when all systems are under consideration. Average island distance from the nearest coast, number of islands and the island surface area were the geographic variables best correlated with the community patterns produced by polychaetes. Biogeographic patterns suggest a vicariance model dominating over the founder-dispersal model except for the semi-closed regional seas, where a model substantially modified from the second option could be supported