Developing benthic monitoring programmes to support precise and representative status assessments: a case study from the
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Developing benthic monitoring programmes to support precise and representative status assessments: a case study from the Baltic Sea Henrik Nygård & Mats Lindegarth & Alexander Darr & Grete E. Dinesen & Ole R. Eigaard & Inga Lips
Received: 21 April 2020 / Accepted: 17 November 2020 / Published online: 27 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Benthic habitats and communities are key components of the marine ecosystem. Securing their functioning is a central aim in marine environmental management, where monitoring data provide the base for assessing the state of marine ecosystems. In the Baltic Sea, a > 50-year-long tradition of zoobenthic monitoring exists. However, the monitoring programmes were designed prior to the current policies, primarily to detect long-term trends at basin-scale and are thus not optimal to fulfil recent requirements such as area-based periodic status assessments. Here, we review the current monitoring programmes and assess the precision and representativity of the monitoring data in status assessments to identify routes for improvement. H. Nygård (*) Marine Research Centre, Finnish Environment Institute, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] M. Lindegarth Department of Marine Science–Tjärnö, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden A. Darr Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, Rostock, Germany G. E. Dinesen : O. R. Eigaard National Institute of Aquatic Resources, Technical University of Denmark, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark I. Lips Department of Marine Systems, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia
At present, the monitoring is focused on soft-bottoms, not accounting for all habitat types occurring in the Baltic Sea. Evaluating the sources of variance in the assessment data revealed that the component accounting for variability among stations forms the largest proportion of the uncertainty. Furthermore, it is shown that the precision of the status estimates can be improved, with the current number of samples. Reducing sampling effort per station, but sampling more stations, is the best option to improve precision in status assessments. Furthermore, by allocating the sampling stations more evenly in the sub-basins, a better representativity of the area can be achieved. However, emphasis on securing the long-term data series is needed if changes to the monitoring programmes are planned. Keywords Benthic habitats . Monitoring design . Marine management . Marine Strategy Framework Directive . Uncertainty . Baltic Sea
Introduction The seafloor provides a wide range of habitats inhabited by benthic communities and delivering a diverse set of ecosystem services (Galparsoro et al. 2014). The functioning of these habitats, e.g. in carbon and nutrient cycling and retention or as feeding and nursery grounds for higher trophic levels (Kritzer et al. 2016; Griffiths et al. 2017) is, however, threatened due to increasing pressure from anthropogenic activities in the marine environment (Halpern et al. 2015). Reliable estimates
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