• Services
  • Projects
  • Publications
    • Reports
    • Scientific publications
  • About us
  • Coworkers
  • Work with us
  • Contact
  • Swedish
  • English

AquaBiota

- part of the NIRAS group

  • About us
  • Coworkers
  • Work with us
  • Contact
  • Swedish
  • English
  • Services
  • Projects
  • Publications
    • Reports
    • Scientific publications

Conservation and nested targets within marine protected areas in Sweden

2018-12-19 AquaBiota

AquaBiota did an analysis of spatial information for different Natura 2000 habitats and, conservation- and nested targets. The analysis is meant to support the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management investigation regarding the ecological functionality, connectivity and representativeness of the network of Marine Protected Areas (MPA) in Sweden.

Within Swedish marine areas there are several habitats that has been selected for conservation and protection of biodiversity. To evaluate how representative the Marine Protected Areas (i.e. Koster National Park, nature reserves and Natura 2000 areas) a GIS-analysis for the entire Swedish ocean area was conducted where we investigated how much of the conservation- and nested targets, and Natura 2000 habitats that are protected in relation to ocean area. The conservation targets are divided into soft- and hard bottom, and photic and aphotic zones, whereas Natura 2000 habitats are areas considered by the EU as important for biodiversity or have a limited geographical distribution, such as mudflats and sandflats not covered by seawater at low tide or estuaries. The nested targets included in this included ecologically important habitats, such as mussel banks and reproduction areas for fish and porpoise or areas with high probability of ringed seals, grey seals and harbor seals.

The Swedish ocean area is divided into three marine spatial areas (Gulf of Bothnia, Baltic Sea and, Skagerrak and Kattegat) and in order to compare the three different areas the analysis was made separately. In the same way, an analysis was performed for the different counties. In most of the cases the Marine Protected Areas was similar in comparison between the marine spatial areas and counties but sometimes there were also differences. This could be related to the natural variation in the distribution of nested targets and species but in other cases, some habitats might be underrepresented. This is important to take into consideration when designating new marine protected areas.

Report (in Swedish): Dahl, M. & Näslund, J. 2018: Representativitet av marina bevarandemål och naturvärden inom Sveriges skyddade områden. AquaBiota Notes 2018:05.

Conservation targets. Light red: Photic softbottom (fotisk mukbotten), Red: Aphotic softbottom (afotisk mjukbotten), Light blue: Photic hardbottoms (fotisk hårdbåtten), Blue: Aphotic hardbottom (afotisk hårdbotten).

Filed Under: Other

Contact


Martin Isæus
Project director
MD, PhD Marine ecology
martin.isaeus@niras.se

News

AquaBiota – part of the NIRAS group

Sep 01

September 1st, AquaBiota joined the NIRAS group! … Read more »

AquaBiota Gasell 2022

Aug 30

AquaBiota has been appointed as a Gasell Company … Read more »

‘Mixed species groups in mammals’, one of 16 classic papers celebrating 50 years of Mammal Review

Dec 16

A paper by Eva Isaeus and others is featured in a … Read more »

Application and EIA for Storgrundet announced

Dec 16

Earlier this year, wpd submitted an application to … Read more »

Webinars about large-scale sustainable offshore wind power

Dec 15

During November and December, AquaBiota conducted … Read more »

New paper on trend correlations for coastal eutrophication

Mar 31

Trend correlations for coastal eutrophication and … Read more »

See all posts »

Requests

mils.anbud@niras.se

 

AquaBiota Water Research ABWR AB

c/o NIRAS
Hantverkargatan 11B
112 21 Stockholm

Copyright © 2025 AquaBiota · An iGoMoon Website · Log in

We use cookies on this website to gather information how you use the website so we can improve the experience for you. By continuing to use our services, you are giving us your consent to use cookies.