Development of marine landscape maps for the Baltic Sea and the Kattegat using geophysical and hydrographical parameters

Abstract

The Baltic Sea is one of the largest brackish water bodies in the world (Segerstråle 1957) with a number of basins varying from almost fresh water in the northern part of the Bothnian Bay via the more brackish conditions in the southern part to the saline waters of the Kattegat. The Baltic Sea is subject to severe environmental degradation caused by commercial and leisure activities, including fisheries, dredging, tourism, coas t a l development and land-based pollution sources. This causes severe pressures on vulnerable marine habitats and natural re- sources, and a tool for aiding marine management is therefore strongly needed. The marine landscape concept presented by Roff &Taylor (2000) is based on the use of available broad-scale geological, physical and hydrographical data to prepare ecologically meaningful maps for areas with little or no biological information. The concept, which was elaborated by Day & Roff (2000) was applied in UK waters (Connor et al. 2006) before it was adopted by the BALANCE project described here. The aim of developing marine landscape maps is to characterise the marine environment of the Baltic Sea region (the Baltic Sea together with the Kattegat) using geophysical and hydrographical parameters. Such maps can be applied, for example, to an assessment of the Baltic-wide network of marine protected areas, and thus provide a sustainable ecosystem-based approach to the protection of the marine environment from human activities, and contribute to the conservation of marine biodiversity. The BALANCE project is based on transnational and cross-sectoral co-operation with participants from nine countries surrounding the Baltic Sea as well as Norway (Fig. 1), and is partially financed by the European Union through the BSR INTERREG IIIB programme.

The diet of whiting Merlangius merlangus in the western Baltic Sea

“…The Baltic Sea is a brackish semi‐enclosed sea connected to the North Sea through the inner Danish waters and the Sound (Leppäkoski et al , ; Johannesson & André, ). Both salinity (Lehmann et al , ; Feistel et al , ; Al‐Hamdani et al , ) and species diversity decrease from south‐west to north‐east (Leppäkoski et al , ; Johannesson & André, ). Compared to the North Sea, the upper part of the food web contains few fish species (Link et al , ).…”

Landscape mapping at sub-Antarctic South Georgia provides a protocol for underpinning large-scale marine protected areas

“…Biological data are then used to ground-truth the map to test how effective proxy habitat classification is for modelling biological distributions. Marine landscape mapping is often adopted as a broad-scale approach to habitat classification 15 16 , but is a technique with application across spatial scales 17 18 19 . Through this approach, different geomorphic features such as canyons, pinnacles, rocky ridges and muddy basins can be mapped, either for their own intrinsic conservation value 20 , or for use as proxies of particular types of benthic habitats 21 .…”

Picking Up the Pieces—Harmonising and Collating Seabed Substrate Data for European Maritime Areas

“…Individual data points could be reclassified on the basis of sample analysis or description, or/and mapped units could be translated into the most likely Folk class using expert-based prediction. Experiences from previous European projects enabled reclassification in a simple and transparent way [19]. The first step in the reclassification was to study the range of surface substrate in the original categories.…”