Marine Monitoring Handbook
(2001)
Davies, J., Baxter, J., Bradley, M., Connor, D., Khan, J., Murray, E., Sanderson, W., Turnbull, C. & Vincent, M.
The Marine Monitoring Handbook addresses the principles behind, and the procedures for, monitoring the habitats and species within marine SACs in UK waters to assess their condition. These assessments are intended to fulfil the requirements of the EC Habitats and Species Directive and the UK's common standards for monitoring.
Overview of Marine Monitoring Handbook (MMH)
The
UK Marine SACs
project was set up to establish management schemes on selected
marine Special Areas of Conservation (SACs). It focussed on twelve
marine SACs around the UK coastline to build our knowledge and
establish the best practise needed for the management and
monitoring of marine sites. The
Marine Monitoring
Handbook is one of the key outputs of the project and will
be used as guidance by the UK government's statutory nature
conservation agencies and their key partners in drawing up
monitoring schemes for marine SACs.
The Handbook provides guidance on the different options and
their relative costs and benefits and describes best practise
through a series of procedural guidelines for the common
survey/monitoring techniques. It draws on the information gathered
from extensive trials of different techniques and their deployment
undertaken during the UK Marine SACs project to ensure all advice
has a sound practical basis.
The Marine Monitoring Handbook should be
viewed as a toolkit to assist those with responsibility for
monitoring to select and use appropriate methods. It is not
prescriptive, rather it aims to support good decision making in
marine SAC monitoring in the light of resource availability and
other practicalities.
Furthermore, as our practical knowledge of monitoring
increases, and the marine monitoring requirements are addressed in
greater detail within the European Union, the guidance set out in
the Handbook is likely to change. The Handbook should, therefore,
be considered as a live working
document.
You can obtain copies of the text as:
Contact points for further advice
The source of advice will depend on the nature of the query.
In general:
- For clarification of any points in the text in this Handbook,
queries should be addressed to the authors who are listed under
each section, including the Procedural Guidelines; or
- General queries, queries of a UK nature, or advice on common
standards monitoring for marine SACs should be emailed to
(JNCC).
Future progress of the Marine Monitoring Handbook
Further work will be carried out to improve the coverage and
content of the Handbook. In particular:
- We will increase the number and range of Procedural Guidelines
to cover all the techniques listed in Section 6 of the
Handbook;
- We will revise Sections 3 and 4 of the Handbook, taking account
of further work to identify the most cost-effective design of
monitoring programmes for particular Annex I habitats and Annex II
species, and the level of skills needed to carry out the work;
- We will improve the level of guidance in relation to Annex II
species;
- We will provide a glossary of terms and a bibliography divided
by topic.
The Marine Monitoring Handbook will be
maintained here on the JNCC Internet site, and this electronic
version will be the most up-to-date copy available. Modifications
to the Handbook, following the further work referred to above, will
be incorporated into this version. We will develop a 'notice board'
on this website to enable users to provide feedback on the
Handbook. A mechanism, probably e-mail, will be established to
alert users when new material, or revision of existing material, is
published.
Comments on this text, and suggestions for improvement, are
welcomed. All comments should be emailed to
at JNCC and, if
necessary, they will be incorporated into later electronic
versions.
Download in sections:
- Introduction (PDF, 253 kb)
- Section 1
Background (PDF, 327 kb)
- Section 2 Establishing monitoring
programmes for marine featrues (PDF, 511 kb)
- Section 3 Guidance
for establishing monitoring programmes for Annex I
habitats (PDF, 528 kb including the following subsections)
- Section 4 Guidance
for establishing monitoring programmes for some Annex II
species (PDF, 267 kb including the following subsections)
- Section 5 Advice on
selecting appropriate monitoring techniques (PDF, 331 kb)
- Section 6 Procedural
guidelines (PDF, 336 kb)
-
- PG 1.1 Intertidal
resource mapping (PDF, 323 kb)
- PG 1.2 Viewpoint
photography (PDF, 117 kb)
- PG 1.3
AGDS (PDF, 222 kb)
- PG 1.4 Side scan
sonar (PDF, 436 kb)
- PG 1.5 Mosaicing sonar
images (PDF, 674 kb) added May 2005
- PG 1.6 Point sample mapping
(PDF, 48 kb) added May
2005
- PG 2.2 Sediment profile
imagery (PDF, 170 kb)
- PG 2.3 Surveying sea
caves (PDF, 170 kb)
- PG 3.1 Intertidal biotope
ID (PDF, 128 kb)
- PG 3.2 Intertidal
ACE (PDF, 96 kb)
- PG 3.3 Subtidal biotope
ID (PDF, 209 kb)
- PG 3.4 ROV (in prep.)
- PG 3.5 Drop down
video (PDF, 277 kb)
- PG 3.6 Intertidal core
sampling (PDF, 120 kb)
- PG 3.7 Subtidal quadrat
sampling (PDF, 189 kb)
- PG 3.8 Sublittoral
coring by diver (PDF, 126 kb)
- PG 3.9 Grab
sampling (PDF, 154 kb)
- PG 3.10 Suction
sampling (PDF, 269 kb)
- PG 3.11 Intertidal
quadrat photography (PDF, 184 kb)
- PG 3.12 Sublittoral
photography (PDF, 221 kb)
- PG 3.13 Subtidal hand-held
video (PDF, 115 kb)
- PG 3.14 Towed
sledge (PDF, 198 kb)
- PG 4.1 Fish in subtidal
rock habitats (PDF, 176 kb)
- PG 4.2 Fish in vegetative
cover (PDF, 165 kb)
- PG 4.3 Fish on
sediments (PDF, 173 kb)
- PG 4.4 Fish in
rockpools (PDF, 128 kb)
- PG 4.5 Photo ID of
bottlenose dolphin (PDF 982 kb) added
May 2005
- PG 6.1
dGPS (PDF, 287 kb)
- PG 6.2 Site
relocation (PDF, 454 kb)
- PG 6.3 Specimen
collection (PDF, 143 kb)
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405 pp
ISBN 1 85716 550 0
Please cite as: Davies, J., Baxter, J., Bradley, M., Connor, D., Khan, J., Murray, E., Sanderson, W., Turnbull, C. & Vincent, M., (2001), Marine Monitoring Handbook, 405 pp, ISBN 1 85716 550 0