News

Additional Online Resources for Use of Marine Conservation Advice Packages Published by Natural England

Natural England has a responsibility to provide Conservation Advice for all Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) within England’s inshore waters (out to 12 nautical miles) to support sites to achieve their conservation objectives and to guide effective management.  A range of  supplementary material is now available online to to aid users navigate and understand Marine Conservation Advice. Resources available include guidance videos, FAQs, an interactive map, glossary and supporting material.

The supporting material can be accessed at this link 

Visualising the Undersea World

(Photo Credit: Paula Lightfoot)

One of the difficulties that conservationists often face when trying to explain the marine world is that, for the majority of people, the places we are trying to protect cannot be experienced directly and remain hidden from view below the surface of the sea. Documentaries such as Blue Planet can be an important way of building understanding by allowing the public to see and appreciate an undersea world which might otherwise be inaccessible to them. Closer to home a number of organisations have made video footage of our local marine environment available online, which can be a valuable tool in helping to demonstrate the features which we are aiming to conserve.

Natural England has produced a series of videos showing the underwater landscapes of the English coast, including this sequence covering the area from Lindisfarne to Spurn Point.

Also available from Natural England are two short films which look (from a national level) at the life found in mud and sand, and on rocky reefs – habitats that are all of high importance to us on the North East coast.

Scottish Natural Heritage also have some great online resources, such as a series of virtual dives, and this footage of diving guillemots at Petticowick near St Abbs

For links to more videos please see the ‘Marine Visualisation Resources’ section on our Links page

CoastXplore App

The Capturing Our Coast project have launched their new CoastXplore app. The app can be installed on mobile phones and other Android or iOS devices. It collects information on how we use our coastlines. We know types of activities that occur on our coast, such as sea angling and surfing, but we don’t have much information on the number of people doing each activity. The information submitted via the app will be added to a national database which will be used by organisations who look after our coast to inform decisions they make about our coastline’s management.

The app can be downloaded at https://www.capturingourcoast.co.uk/content/coastxplore

Welcome to Our New Online Toolkit and Website

Welcome to our new online toolkit and website. We hope this will provide a handy one-stop-shop for all of your information needs about the marine environment along the Berwickshire and Northumberland coast. The site is intended as a working tool to help those organisations undertaking management of our inshore waters and we welcome feedback on its content and ease of use. Please contact us if you have any queries about the content or suggestions about how it can be improved. The creation of the toolkit has been made possible by a Resilient Heritage grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, whose support we gratefully acknowledge. Thank you also to Northumberland IFCA for administrating the HLF, to Natural England for the additional funds towards costs of the site, and to the many people who made their photographs available for use: Paula Lightfoot, Iain Robson, Tom Cadwallender, The National Trust for Scotland, Stuart Pudney, Natural England, The National Trust, The Environment Agency, James Kitson, Max Kelly, Visit Berwickshire Coast, NIFCA, Kelsey Potlock, and Rory Lane.

New Conservation Advice for Northumberland published

Conservation Advice packages for the Farne Islands Special Protection Area (SPA), the Aln Estuary Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ),  and the Coquet to St Mary’s MCZ have recently been published by Natural England.

Theses draft Advice Packages can be used to assess the impacts of ongoing or proposed management activities and include information about:

• Designated or qualifying features
• Habitats and species that they are dependent on and where they occur
• Conservation objectives
• Minimum targets each feature needs to achieve to meet the conservation objectives
• Features which may be sensitive to human activity
• Condition of the designated or qualifying features
• The evidence-base used to create the advice

All of the published Advice Packages for the Northumberland coast can be viewed at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/northern-north-sea-marine-area-index-map-and-site-packages