Lead Contact Details

Name: Marine Scotland
Email: marinescotland@gov.scot
Tel:0300 244 4000

Status

Directorate within the Scottish Government

Geography Area Covered

Scottish seas out to 12 nautical miles

Membership Details

The partnership governance groups this organisation is represented on are:

Marine Protected Areas

Marine Scotland operates, or has management which influence, on the following inshore marine protected areas between Fast Castle Head and the River Tyne:

Responsibilites

Management Actions

Marine Scotland has the following management measures in place to ensure its functions and regulatory powers are carried out in a manner that achieves the conservation objectives for the inshore marine protected areas in which it operates:

  1. All strategic plans and policies produced by Marine Scotland will be subject to the application of Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive with advice provided by Scottish Natural Heritage.
  2. All marine licence applications will be subject to the application of Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive with advice provided by Scottish Natural Heritage.
  3. Ensure CEFAS and SEPA guidelines for levels of contaminants in dredge spoil are applied when assessing marine licence applications.
  4. For activities that Marine Scotland regulates: where unconsented activities take place, Marine Scotland will ensure appropriate enforcement action is taken if those activities adversely impact features of marine protected areas listed above.
  5. Maintain the static gear reserve adjacent to the Berwickshire coast and take appropriate enforcement action to ensure the requirements of the reserve are met.
  6. Local fisheries compliance staff will work in partnership with Northumberland Inshore Fisheries and Conservation Authority, sharing information where appropriate and when required to ensure effective cross-border fisheries management.
  7. Continue to explore opportunities to establish pot management scheme in Scotland.
  8. The provision of European Maritime and Fisheries Funds will only occur where the requirements of international, European and national marine environmental legislation are met.
  9. Maintain the seal shooting licensing system in Scotland.
  10. Marine emergency planning and response for oil and chemical spills will take marine protected areas into account and will seek to cause
  11. Chair the Environment Group that provides advice to marine emergency planning and oil/chemical response.
  12. Collecting and storing data to support marine policy, guidance, management and enforcement
  13. Managing the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund in Scotland

Data, Information and Mapping

Marine Scotland holds the following data that could be of interest to other partners who are responsible for managing marine areas:

Marine Scotland Information:Home for information, interactive maps, larger geospatial data and other related data to support the maps layers on Marine Scotland MAPS NMPi and also to host the pages previously known as Marine Scotland interactive.

Marine Scotland Maps NMPI: An online, interactive GIS-based tool allowing you to view different types of information (as layers) at a scale of your choice and undertake a number of functions with the maps layers including creating maps for printing. Where possible links have been provided to related parts of Scotland’s Marine Atlas, updated graphs and data as well as links to data sources to facilitate data download. New data are regularly being added

Marine Scotland Data: Dedicated portal that will allow you to search Marine Scotland’s published datasets and reports. Citation information for these datasets is provided through the use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). The portal is being developed, and new content is being added all the time.

East Coast Marine Mammal Acoustic Study: ECOMMAS is a long-term, on-going study into how underwater noise generated by offshore industry impacts the distribution of dolphins and porpoises in the Scottish North Sea. Acoustic recorders (C-PODs and SM2Ms) are deployed at 30 sites across 10 locations along the east coast. They record underwater noise and count echolocation clicks to measure dolphin and porpoise presence and absence. They are deployed in the spring and are recovered after  4 months. In 2015 and 2016, a second deployment was issued in July/August. Data is from several locations along the east coast of Scotland, including some records from St Abb’s

Estimated at-sea Distribution of Grey and Harbour Seals – updated maps 2017:GIS files (UTM zone 30N WGS84 Shapefiles and GeoTIFFs) of gridded harbour (Phoca vitulina) and grey (Halichoerus grypus) seal at-sea (i.e. marine) and total (i.e. marine and haul out combined) usage estimates were produced for Marine Scotland (Marine Mammal Scientific Support Research Programme MMSS/002/15) by the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU).