The European Marine Board (EMB) launched its Future Science Brief on ‘Marine habitat mapping’ during a ‘Brown bag lunch’ event, hosted by DG Environment in Brussels, on June 17th. Three project partners from EMODnet Seabed Habitats (ESH) are members of the EMB Habitat Mapping Working Group that delivered this document. The brief highlights how marine habitat maps are required to support a wide variety of marine policies, including the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and policies to deliver the ambitious plans of the European Green Deal.
ESH partners have collated and published over 1000 marine habitat maps in European waters on the EMODnet Central Portal. This library of maps was used by the Working Group to calculate the spatial extent and thematic resolution of maps collated (Figure 1). The analysis identified critical gaps in geographic extent, especially in the deep sea, and demonstrated that the majority of seabed mapped only describes the physical aspects of marine habitats and lacks any data on species and communities. This is an important fact to highlight to policy makers who can propose funding for programmes to produce more biologically-themed marine habitat maps to fulfil the reporting requirements of policies such as the Nature Restoration Law.
The brief also highlights the need to make maps more easily accessible to a variety of stakeholders to increase their value for end-users. The EMODnet Central Portal is an excellent example of how marine habitat mapping data products can be shared and freely accessed.
Read the full brief: https://www.marineboard.eu/publications/marine-habitat-mapping