Coastal Monitoring

Why monitor the coastal ecosystem?
Marine Scotland’s aim is to secure the vision of clean, safe, productive, healthy and biologically diverse marine and coastal environments, managed to meet the long term needs of nature and people. By 2020 Scotland aims to achieve and maintain good environmental status, under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, for Scottish seas.

What is Marine Scotland doing?
Marine Scotland monitors key points around the coast to examine how Scotland’s seas and oceans respond to environmental pressures, aiding assessment of their state and natural variability. Understanding this variability is critical when defining good environmental status.

How is this achieved?
Marine Scotland measures temperature, salinity, inorganic nutrients and the plankton community (phytoplankton (small plants) and zooplankton (small animals)) on a weekly basis, at a number of sites around the Scottish coast. These time series of data (the oldest starting in 1997), allow the state of the marine ecosystem to be assessed.

A national asset
The coastal ecosystem monitoring programme is unique in Scotland because of the geographic range, duration, high sampling frequency and multiple parameters measured. Data from this programme is supplied to national and international organisations e.g. Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) , Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra), International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), to fulfil national and international reporting obligations.

A growing resource
Marine Scotland’s time series data collected in the coastal ecosystem monitoring programme are an essential asset. As they extend into the future they will increasingly help us to understand the dynamics of the marine ecosystem. This puts Scotland in a good position to fulfil the requirements of European legislation as well as optimise use of our national resource.