Fish Habitat

This service contains data on both spwaning and nursery grounds. These can be described as follows: Fish Spawning Grounds: This layer is the nominal spawning distribution as gauged from the distribution and relative abundance of egg and/or larval stages from contemporary data and Coull et al. (1998). Areas with higher concentrations of eggs and/or larvae that are considered to relate to more important spawning grounds are designated as high intensity. This data is focused on species that are considered to be of conservation importance because it was developed for the Marine Conservation Zones project. This may be insufficient for other applications. Fish Nursery Grounds: This layer provides the nominal nursery grounds for 17 highly mobile species distributed at a half ICES statistical rectangle resolution (0.5 by 0.5 degrees), Data were obtained from sampling surveys and Coull et al. (1998). Areas of higher concetrations of juveniles are considered to relate to more important nursery grounds. High intensity nursery grounds are those deemed as a main nursery ground with high relative abundance of juveniles. Known Limitations: There are several data quality issues, especially regarding taxonomic identification (Section 2.3), that need to be considered when interpreting the data layers. For other elements of data quality, it is recommended by CEFAS that the users of the data layers refer to the associated report on the distribution of highly mobile species (Defra Project MB0102, Report No. 15, Task 2B). More intensive surveys have been undertaken in the Irish Sea, and higher resolution (HR) maps are provided for Cod, Sole and Plaice Nominal spawning grounds for Ling are for a fringe of the distribution. The main distribution of Ling is not sampled appropriately for eggs & larvae, and no shapefile is provided. Data for the North Sea population of mackerel were not available during this study. For those areas (e.g. NW Scotland, parts of the English Channel and Irish Coasts) where there are no recent egg/larval data we recommend the user consult Coull et al. (1998) until more recent data become available. In many cases, available data are limited or are of questionable quality (e.g. due to taxonomic problems, sampling artefacts etc.). Hence, there was a need to attach a measure of confidence for the data available (see Table 4 om ). To enhance the way the data can be classified the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) carried out additional analysis to identify areas that were high or low intensity for multiple species. This allows the data to be classified by High/Low intensity and by the number of species. Each record contains attribution on the intensity, number of species and species type. Analysis was carried out using Geoprocessing tools in ArcGIS and ET Geowizard (Union, Advanced Edit, Dissolve and Spatial Join).