MECN Final Report – May 2005
Marine
Environmental
Change
Network
Final Report
Compiled by M.T. Frost
Marine Biological Association of the UK, Plymouth, PL1 2PB
September 2005
Marine Environmental Change Network – Contract No.: CDEP 84/5/311
Executive Summary
The recognition of the importance of long-term time series has been a fairly recent development. In 2002, the Inter-Agency Committee on Marine Science and Technology (IACMST) identified an urgent need for the continuation, restoration and enhancement of marine observations around the UK and, in response to this, the Marine Environmental Change Network (MECN) was established. This report outlines the findings of the pilot phase of the MECN from 2002 to 2005. The report outlines the original objectives and then shows how each of these objectives has been achieved.
The distinct role of the MECN is important in providing ‘contextual monitoring’ that informs ‘compliance monitoring’ and unique in that the time series being maintained by MECN partners are some of the longest of any marine time series in the world (decadal to multi-decadal). Through the network, these time series can be compared over a wide geographical range.
The MECN has grown significantly from 6 original members to a total of 17. Details of data collected by MECN members have been used to construct a metadata catalogue that is accessible through the MECN website ( which also provides a comprehensive search facility for the catalogue. Quality assurance of the data series has been reviewed to assess the accuracy of measurements and the comparability between different time series.
annualmonitoring reports have been prepared for the West Coast region by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS); for the Irish Sea by Port Erin Marine Laboratory (PEML); for the North Sea by Dove Marine laboratory and for the Western English Channel by Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) and Marine Biological Association (MBA). These reports are available as separate documents but a summary of key findings as a result of monitoring in each of the areas is provided.
Data from time series have been used in a number of investigations, some of which may have important policy implications. Data from SAMS have shown a general warming trend in UK shelf waters and, by comparison with PEML data, have shown how this trend mirrors that in coastal waters. Data from PEML have revealed a potential threat to the well being of the Irish Sea ecosystem as a result of long-term nutrient enrichment of the Irish Sea which is highly relevant to the Water Framework Directive (WFD). Analyses of time series data from PML have produced findings that may have important implications for our understanding of variations in nutrients and fish larval abundance and could therefore be of importance to fisheries management policies. Data from the English Channel compared with data from other regions and time series maintained by Dove Marine Laboratory in the North Sea has helped in our understanding of the relative impacts of climate change and fishing on the marine ecosystem as a whole.
The pilot phase of the MECN has highlighted the importance of long term time series and the need for allocation of more resources for long-term data collection if we are not to miss important changes in the marine environment, such as the rapid rise in sea surface temperature from the late 1980s onwards (particularly evident in the Irish Sea and English Channel) and the two regime shifts seen in the plankton (1988, 1997). It is now vital that the MECN continues to develop and expand as a network, making sure links are maintained and developed between the research community and other initiatives such as the terrestrial Environmental Change Network (ECN) and the Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP). Continuation of the MECN will contribute to forecasts of future ecosystem changes and development of an Ecosystem approach to marine environmental management.
List of Contents
Executive Summary
List of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
Background
What is the MECN (Aims, Scope and Value)?
Aims and Objectives
MECN Scope
Value
Chapter 2: Establishing the Network
Partners
Membership Status
Website
Chapter 3: Collation of archived information and databases
Metadata catalogue
Access policy
Remote sensing
Chapter 4: Intercalibration and quality assurance
Chapter 5: Time series monitoring reports
Reporting
Key Findings:
Western English Channel:
North Sea:
Irish Sea:
Tiree Passage:
Chapter 6. Analysis of archived data and contextual analysis and interpretation
Synthesis Case Studies
CASE STUDY 1: Climate change and shelf exchange; Tiree Passage and the Ellett Line (SAMS).
CASE STUDY 2: Irish Sea Eutrophication & implications for Water Framework Directive (WFD).
CASE STUDY 3: Nutrients in the English Channel – a cautionary tale.
CASE STUDY 4: Disentangling fishing & climate
Chapter 7: Reporting and dissemination
Reports
Defra Contract Reports
Scientific Reports
Supplementary Reports
Reports by MECN partners
Conference presentations
Publications
Chapter 8: Conclusions of pilot phase
Chapter 9: MECN continuation - a forward look
Risk of Discontinuing MECN
Networking benefits
Monitoring (Time-series)
Resources
Outputs
Forecasting and Predicting change
Long-term aims (continuation of pilot phase and beyond)
Contribution of the MECN to the ecosystem approach to environmental management.
Acknowledgements
APPENDIX
A proposal to Defra for the continuation of the pilot phase of the UK Marine Environmental Change Network
Continuation of pilot phase Deliverables:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Background
There has been a recent renaissance of interest in long-term research[1], in contrast to the 1980’s when extended time-series were very unfashionable and deemed uninteresting science. This is largely due to the need to understand and manage environmental change caused by factors such as changing climate and broad-scale human impacts on marine ecosystems (e.g. eutrophication and fishing).
For UK waters, the urgent need for the continuation, restoration and enhancement of marine observations and the establishment of a network of parties involved in this work were identified through an IACMST Review of Current Marine Observations in relation to present and future needs (IACMST, 2000)[2]. The Marine Environmental Change Network (MECN) was established in 2002 as a direct response to this need.
The importance of the monitoring and long-term research being undertaken by the MECN is underlined by a number of important policy directives; some of which have been adopted since the original IASCMST recommendations. These includeinternational conventions such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) and the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
At the European level this has been formalised by various Directives (Habitats, Urban Waste Water and now Water Framework, reformed Common Fisheries Policy) promoting healthy and sustainably managed seas and coasts. In the UK it is enshrined in the commitment by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to Marine Stewardship delivered through an ecosystem-based approach (Defra, 2002)[3].
To deliver a marine management scheme that is ‘ecosystem based’ requires an understanding of how the various ecosystem components interact with each other and how they respond to natural and anthropogenic drivers. The MECN is a cornerstone for delivering this understanding for the UK through providing data sets and analysis across ecosystem components and developing our understanding of ecosystem functioning. In particular, the monitoring and analysis integral to the MECN allows a greater degree of separation of natural fluctuations from global (climate change), regional (e.g. eutrophication, fishing) and local (e.g. point source pollution, aggregate extraction) anthropogenic impacts.
What is the MECN (Aims, Scope and Value)?
Aims and Objectives
The MECN network was established in order to ensure delivery and interpretation of long-term and broad-scale contextual information, including cross-calibration and cross-correlation of results to inform status, water quality and compliance monitoring. The pilot phase was intended to demonstrate the benefits of preservingand networking long-term time series data – and most importantly continuing and enhancing extant programmes and re-starting those in abeyance.
The MECN was set up in 2002 with the following objectives:
- Establish a marine environmental change network
- Collate archived information in a database
- Ensure intercalibration and quality assurance of the data network
- Co-ordinate, restart and enhance time series measurements at the following locations:
- WesternEnglish Channel (Plymouth): Marine Biological Association (MBA), Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), and Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS)
- North Sea (Cullercoats): Dove Marine Laboratory, University of Newcastle (Dove ML)
- Irish Sea (Isle of Man): Port Erin Marine Laboratory (PEML)
- Tiree Passage: Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS)
and integrate these with other programmes and networks (e.g. the Marine Biodiversity and Climate Change Project (MarClim)), as appropriate
- Analyse and cross-correlate data to provide contextual interpretation for informing reports and integrate these with broader scale remote-sensing and Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) data
- Report and disseminate the above activities
Longer-term aspirations included the adoption of newer technologies (remote sensing, deployment of moored data-logging buoys) and in order to integrate them with discrete sampling approaches, particularly in the English Channel.
MECN Scope
It is important to be able to distinguish what makes the MECN unique from the other various UK monitoring ‘strands’ when considering the role that the MECN is likely to play in the monitoring framework being currently developed by the Marine Monitoring Coordination Group (MMCG) for the United Kingdom. Obviously the way in which the current monitoring programmes differ from one another, the areas in which they overlap, and how they eventually fit together to form a coherent monitoring strategy will become clearer as the strategy is discussed and developed over the coming period.
The MECN differs fundamentally from many other current monitoring initiatives for the UK in a number of ways. Firstly, no element of the monitoring being undertaken by the MECN is ‘compliance monitoring’,[4] specifically targeted at quality issues or driven by the need to meet any requirements (i.e. such as those arising under commitments to conventions such as the OSPAR Joint Assessment Monitoring Programme[5], (JAMP)). This is in contrast to the aims of monitoring programmes such as the National Marine Monitoring Programme (NMMP). The main drivers of the NMMP as outlined in the NMMP methods manual[6] are:
- To meet temporal trend monitoring requirements of the OSPAR international agreement
- For compliance with EC directives
- To meet research and development needs
-which may be driven by OSPAR or nationally.
- For local monitoring
A recent report of the NMMP[7] also states that it “was designed to fulfil the UK’s mandatory monitoring requirements under the OSPAR JAMP and provides data in support of EC Directives”. Although the NMMP necessarily contains components that just measure natural environmental variability (e.g. during the first phase of the NMMP, offshore reference sites were used to compare with impacted estuaries[8]) it is still, as a subgroup of the Marine Environment Monitoring Group (MEMG) reporting on the Marine Environmental Quality monitoring sector (see Charting Progress Report 1[9]), largely concerned with quality issues[10].
The MECN, however, is concerned with ‘contextual monitoring’, which is able to inform ‘compliance’ or ‘commitment’ monitoring[11] (Figure 1). This means that compliance monitoring, for example, will allow you to tick a box (e.g. if a particular pollutant is present above a certain threshold concentration or not), however, this does not necessarily provide us with an understanding as to the processes causing this effect (which could be diverse). The decadal time series in MECN each monitor key component parts of the marine ecosystem (e.g. temperature, salinity, nutrients, zoo- and phytoplanktonic communities) at various points around the UK to attempt to provide this understanding. By combining these different elements, we can gain greater understanding of marine ecosystems in order to better assess marine ecosystem health, hence the need for the network. By providing this understanding, contextual monitoring will allow better interpretation of measurements taken from sites established for compliance or other targeted monitoring purposes. We know, for example, that the type of measurements collected by the MECN can be used to inform issues such as those related to climate change and eutrophication. It should also be noted that these issues were not those envisaged when many of the time series were initiated.
There is some inevitablepotential overlap between some of the MECN monitoring sites and other programmes (see figure 2). Just as it has been recognised by the IACMST Global Ocean Observing System Action Group (GOOS AG) (responsible for the Climates and Processes Sector - see Charting Progress Report 2[12]) that some of the NMMP monitoring and some of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) monitoring may feed into its programme, this potential overlap with other programmes is also true for the MECN.
Figure 1. Diagram comparing the roles of the MECN and NMMP in terms of UK monitoring strategy.
Another issue is scale: MECN provides information on intermediate (shelf-wide and coastal seas) scales (Figure 2). This allows it to inform monitoring being coordinated by GOOS at the wider global oceans scale, either as part of the regional contribution to GOOS through IACMST GOOS AG and EuroGOOS or as an adjunct to this[13]. Most importantly, MECN monitoring allows local conditions (some of the NMMP sites) to be assessed in the light of changes in the wider environment (MECN - ‘contextual monitoring’).
For detail on the current relationship of the MECN to the four UK monitoring sectors and its possible future contribution, see section 9.
Figure 2. Diagram showing the relationship between the MECN and other monitoring programmes to scale of investigation. GOOS = Global Ocean Observing System; COOP = Coastal Oceans Observations Panel(COOM = Coastal Ocean Observations Module). MEMG = Marine Environment Management Group. Habitats = the type of monitoring being undertaken by nature conservation agencies and others (see: Charting Progress: An integrated Assessment of the State of UK seas, Defra, 2005). N.B. The CPR programme run by SAHFOS covers National, European and some global waters from nearshore to oceanic realms.
Value
The MECN time-series are unique. Firstly, this is due to the duration over which the measurements have been collected. In the marine waters of the British Isles, there are only a handful of time series which extend over multi-decadal scales. These have been maintained by MBA, PEML, Dove ML, SAMS, Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), Fisheries Research Services (FRS) and SAHFOS. Additionally, University of Wales Bangor (UWB) has managed to compile a time series out of ad hoc student projects which have been undertaken over many years.
Secondly, the MECN time-series are unique in terms of their location and wide geographical range. All of the time series in MECN are operationally serviceable (i.e. despite being offshore all sampling can be undertaken in a day rather than as part of a research cruise) and this was often a key factor in their original location. A key element of contextual monitoring is to provide broad-scale understanding. To do this well, time series need to be situated sufficiently far from the coast to minimise variability in the data associated with coastal ‘noise’ which can mask signals from broad-scale environmental changes (e.g. eutrophication, climate change). This is the case with all the funded MECN time series and is particularly important as the paucity of offshore sites away from anthropogenic influence being sampled under current UK monitoring programmes has recently been noted[14]
The MBA/PML measurements are for the western English Channel Ecosystem[15] and studies here over the past 100 years have contributed much of the current understanding of how marine ecosystems function; they are situated on the interface of oceanic and nearshore waters . The MBA sites provide boundary conditions for the rest of the English Channel. The PEML Cypris station is located in the Irish Sea gyre and appears to describe the dynamics of this seasonally stratified region well[16]. The Dove sites reflect much of the benthos of the North Sea[17].
Chapter 2: Establishing the Network
Partners
The original MECN partnership consisted of 6 members. This clearly did not represent the full range of marine time series in waters around the British Isles. A consultation of marine institutions and university departments in the British Isles identified those collecting long-term marine data and these were approached regarding membership of the network. There are now 17 partner organisations in the network, which we believe represents all the major groups involved with long-term measurements in the UK and Isle of Man. The location of all partner institutions is shown in Figure 3. The current membership is composed of 13 full and 4 affiliate members[18]. The list of organisations and their membership status is given in table 1.
Figure 3. Map showing location of all MECN partner institutions. See table 1 for full names of partner institutions.
Table 1. Summary table showing MECN partners and membership status. *Full = members contributing data to the network. **Affiliate = members fully active within the network but not actually contributing data.