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A Deep-sea Section for the Marine Habitat Classification of Britain and Ireland (v15.03) 2015

Abstract

This report has been produced to accompany the release of JNCC's Marine Habitat Classification for Britain and Ireland Version 15.03, which has been published on JNCC's website and replaces Version 04.05, which covers the littoral zone to the deep-circalittoral zone. Version 15.03 adds a new deep-sea section.

The previous Marine Habitat Classification for Britain and Ireland, v04.05 (Connor et al 2004), described seabed habitats from the intertidal zone down to depths of c. 200 m. It has become a priority to develop a deep-sea section to allow deep-sea survey data acquired by JNCC and the country nature conservation bodies (CNCBs) to be assigned a biotope. This should help prevent numerous new biotopes being proposed independently for similar data and a loss of cohesion within the classification community.

This report outlines categories for environmental factors, broad community types and specific biological assemblages to be used in the classification of deep-sea habitats. The deep-sea classification outlined in this paper builds on: previous work undertaken at a EUNIS deep-sea workshop held at Plymouth University in April 2010; work undertaken at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Southampton to assign biotopes to deep-sea grab data from the Faroe-Shetland Channel region (Bett 2012); and two unpublished JNCC papers (Jenkins 2012; Parry 2013), which considered options for the overall structure of a deep-sea classification.

Resource type Publication

Topic category Environment

Reference date 2015·03·01

Citation
Parry, M.E.V., Howell, K.L., Narayanaswamy, B.E., Bett, B.J., Jones, D.O.B., Hughes, D.J., Piechaud, N., Nickell, T.D., Ellwood, H.N., Askew, N., Jenkins, C. & Manca, E. 2015. A Deep-sea Section for the Marine Habitat Classification of Britain and Ireland (v15.03), JNCC Report No. 530. JNCC, Peterborough, ISSN 0963-8091.

Lineage
This report has been produced to accompany the release of the JNCC Marine Habitat Classification for Britain and Ireland Version 15.03, which replaces Version 04.05. Appendices 2 and 3 were updated on 2020-02-10 to fix some errors.

Responsible organisation
Communications, JNCC publisher

Limitations on public access No limitations

Use constraints Available under the Open Government Licence 3.0

Metadata date 2020·02·11

Metadata point of contact
Communications, JNCC

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