Gathering evidence
Marine plans must be built on a strong evidence base and we are committed to ensuring our understanding on the activities and resources in our plan areas are understood as fully as possible.
We already hold a significant level of data and evidence on the English marine area, gathered from a number of existing sources to support marine planning and much of this can be viewed online through our through our Marine Planning Portal and Strategic Scoping Report.
However, there may be additional evidence relevant to marine planning that we are not yet aware of and we would strongly encourage anyone with such evidence to submit it to us to assist us in ensuring we have the best possible evidence on which to develop marine plans.
Evidence we need
We are focusing on the priorities identified in the Marine Policy Statement (MPS). This includes assessing the following marine activities to look at their interaction with each other as well as their effect on the marine area:
- marine protected areas
- defence and national security
- energy production and infrastructure development
- ports and shipping
- marine aggregates
- marine dredging and disposal
- telecommunications cabling
- fisheries
- aquaculture
- surface water management and waste water treatment and disposal
- tourism and recreation.
These activities will be assessed against economic, social and environmental considerations including:
- marine ecology and biodiversity
- air quality
- noise
- ecological and chemical water quality and resources
- seascape
- historic environment
- climate change adaptation and mitigation
- coastal change and flooding
- demographics
- economy and society.
Evidence relating to any of these activities or environmental considerations in the marine plan area will be useful in helping us to develop robust marine plans.
In addition to the above, we have recently identified some priority research areas through our Strategic Evidence Plan. These include the following, which will be the focus of our research up to 2015:
- recreational activities
- co-location
- cumulative effects
- fisheries management
- socio-economics
- seabed habitat mapping
- marine protected area management
- ecosystem services
- data mining from government and industry.
Contact information
Marine Planning Team
Marine Management Organisation
Lancaster House
Hampshire Court
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE4 7YH
Tel: 0191 376 2790
Email: planning@
marinemanagement.org.uk
Further information
The Strategic Evidence Plan (SEP) has been developed to set the focus and direction of travel for the MMO's evidence and research programme for the period of 2011 to 2015.
Strategic Evidence Plan (PDF 155 KB)
Help with documents
Some of these documents are in the portable document format (PDF) for downloading. Adobe Acrobat Reader can be freely downloaded from www.adobe.com/uk/