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May newsletter
As I write, Marine Protected Areas have just moved to the centre stage with the publication of the Government’s draft Marine Bill at the beginning of April. The draft bill provides a much clearer vision for how Marine Conservation Zones (MCZs) will be selected and managed which will enable us to plan with much greater certainty.
Finding Sanctuary will be one of four regional projects around the coasts and seas of England that will be responsible for recommending an ecologically coherent network of MCZs to the Secretary of State in 2011. The regional projects will play a central role in ensuring sites are selected with the best available science and strong stakeholder involvement. We will need to set out in detail what species and habitats are being protected and why a particular site has been chosen. We will also be closely connected with National guidance and principles to help us achieve our objectives.
From our perspective the formal endorsement gives a great boost to the project and should help stakeholders understand how sites will be designated and who is taking responsibility. The timetable also helps to focus our minds on what we have to achieve in the next three years-the clock is ticking!
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Building a European dimension for Finding Sanctuary
Interreg funds are familiar to many of us who know projects such as MESH and EROCIPS. This funding stream encourages European countries to work together in a number of different areas. The sea, is of course, inescapably transnational and with European fishing fleets sharing common waters it is vital that we are able to share information and plan MPAs coherently across Europe as well as the UK.
Finding Sanctuary has been working alongside partners in Spain, France and Portugal to set up a European MPA project for the Atlantic Area. During a meeting in London in March we began to develop our ideas for a project that will give us all much greater consistency and coherence in our approach to designing and managing MPAs and ensure that we are able to share information gathered from stakeholders who are operating in shared waters. We also identified further benefits that the project could bring from sharing data, ideas and lessons learned.
It has been fascinating for me to be able to visit the Mer d’Iroise in France and Lira and Cedeira in Spain to see the development of MPAs and the approaches taken. The Mer D’Iroise is a large bay that extends out from the port of Brest in Brittany and is the site of France’s first Atlantic MPA. Over in Galicia in Northern Spain fishermen’s co-operatives approached the University of La Coruna to help them set up an MPA. Following several years of mapping and consultation, one site has been set up in Lira, with another close behind at Cedeira. Both countries are now keen to see these programmes extended and repeated with greater international collaboration.
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Science Workshop Series launched
With funding from Natural England and Devon County Council we will be running a series of science workshops through 2008. These will be small gatherings of people with expert knowledge that will give us detailed targets and parameters which will guide our MPA planning process. It is very important that we need to ensure the defensibility and soundness of our conservation goals and constraints and help to set the quantitative criteria for our MPA network.
The series of workshops will be run through 2008 and are based on an approach developed by the British Columbia Marine Conservation Analysis.
The details of the workshops can be found at http://www.finding-sanctuary.org/engage.php.
We are working with a number of specialist partners such as the RSPB, MarLIN, Marine Conservation Society and Wildlife Trusts to help us organise and facilitate these workshops to bring together those with the best regional knowledge to gather good quality information.
Our first four workshops have been running through April, focusing on breaking down our overarching goals and planning principles into the detailed ecological objectives that we can practically address in Finding Sanctuary, with the knowledge and spatial datasets available today. In essence, we have been addressing the most fundamental questions: What ecological objectives can we address in Finding Sanctuary? What spatial features should we represent in the network and how much? What levels of protection are necessary for these features?
Discussing and recording expert targets in one of the Finding Sanctuary workshops
A summary of the outcome of each workshop will be available on our website within a couple of weeks of each event.
Through the rest of 2008 we will also be running workshops which look at areas such as economics and fisheries. Full details will be sent out when the dates have been planned.
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Fishermap produces first maps of fishing activity from North Devon
Understanding the geography of the human uses of the sea is a critical part of good decision making in MPA design. We are now coming up to the half-way point of this project to record the ecological knowledge and activity of fishermen in Devon and Dorset. Two liaison officers have been working full time around the fishing ports to meet and interview fishermen.
Dan has been concentrating his efforts around the fishing towns in North Devon interviewing potters, trawlers and gill net fishermen from Bideford, Appledore, Ilfracombe and Clovelly. The response has been very good and we have been able to gather over 50% of the total registered fleet.
Meanwhile Spike has been working with fishermen from Devon and has been organising meetings and interviews with fishermen from Plymouth and Brixham.
During meetings our liaison officers work with individual fishermen to complete a simple questionnaire before drawing maps of fishing activity and ecology for their main target species. Once individual maps are grouped together, they are discussed in local group meetings and changed if necessary. We had our first validation meetings in Bideford and Ilfracombe at the end of February and there has certainly been a great deal of interest in the maps. Although this is knowledge that is well known to the fishermen who work in the area, this is the first time that the detailed use of the grounds through the year has been formally recorded.
The distribution of various gear types as described in interviews and group meetings by fishermen from North Devon
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What have we all been doing?
Louise Lieberknecht, Finding Sanctuary’s MPA Network Development Co-ordinator has set up a series of science workshops which will run through 2008. You can read more about these in our workshops section below.
Our GIS specialist Shaun Lewin has developed the database structure for information that is being collected by liaison officers. He has also been working on digitising and processing the data coming from fishermen and developing the finished maps. He has now moved on to sourcing other regional data and processing it into a regional GIS format so that it can be used by Finding Sanctuary.
Our Dorset project liaison officer, Dan Edwards has been focusing his attention in East Dorset, interviewing fishermen in Christchurch and Poole Harbour. Meanwhile, Spike Searle has been concentrating his efforts in two major regional fishing ports, Brixham and Plymouth.
Finding Sanctuary presented to European Fisheries Commissioner Jo Borg
The Finding Sanctuary project was presented to the European Fisheries Commissioner during his visit to Devon on the 28th April. Finding Sanctuary was amongst projects such as Invest in Fish, Dorset Coastal Forum and the Plymouth Marine Sciences Partnership that were highlighted to Europe as examples of innovation and best practice from South West England.
Steering Group meeting in May
Our next Steering Group meeting will be on Thursday May 22nd at Darts Farm. We will also be joined by the head of Defra’s Marine Biodiversity division, Ian Barrett who will present the Government’s vision for an ecologically coherent network of Marine Conservation Zones and the role that the regional projects are expected to play.
Finding Sanctuary’s Website goes interactive
We have just awarded a contract to Exegesis who will be developing a specialist interactive website for Finding Sanctuary. We will soon be able to publish our GIS maps and the development of the MPA network for the public to see through our website.
Although our Project Liaison team will ultimately expand to six people and face-to-face contact with people is a priority, we have to recognise that there is a limit on how many stakeholders the team will be able to speak to in person. It is therefore important that Finding Sanctuary is able to offer different means for people to engage with us. There are potentially hundreds of thousands of interested stakeholders and this interactive website offers a powerful means for the project to gather information about the areas of sea that people use.
Following a basic registration process, we will be able to offer stakeholders the opportunity to engage directly with the project through virtual maps. For example, people will be able to tell us about areas they utilise for their leisure or livelihoods, and what activities they carry out there. They will also be able to contribute their ecological knowledge about the location of habitats, spawning and nursery areas.
We intend to run a limited trial version for a few months before opening it up gradually to more general use by the Autumn.
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