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Fisheries
Fisheries

Marine Scotland manages quota for fish stocks and all inshore fisheries within the 12 nautical mile territorial water limit. It is also responsible for controlling the activities of fishing vessels and fishing effort (days spent at sea) in the North Sea, west of Scotland and Faroese waters.
In this section, citable data and reports relevant to fishing activities will be added.

Data Extent

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UK Open Government Licence (OGL)

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Are MPAs effective in removing fishing pressure from benthic species and habitats? - Associated datasets and code

This zip file contains the datasets and associated code used in the paper "Langton, R., Stirling, D.A., Boulcott, P & Wright, P.J. (2020) Are MPAs effective in removing fishing pressure from benthic habitats and species? Biological Conservation"

"functions" contains R code for functions that are required in other scripts. The datasets that these functions create are already provided.

"Generated shapefiles" folder includes boundary shapefiles and rasters of bottom ruggedness index that were created during the analysis. The code used to create the boundary datasets is within "function\Cleaning and creating boundary functions".

"Habitats" folder contains species point records that were used in the analysis.

"Outputs" an empty folder where results of analysis will be saved when scripts are run

"01_MPA_Area_Analysis" analysis of the area covered by MPAs and various MPA management measures.

"03_Habitats" analysis of the bottom ruggedness in different levels of management and where records of species of interest are located.

doi: 
10.7489/12270-1
Citation: 
Langton, R., Stirling, D.A., Boulcott, P. and Wright, P.J., (Submitted). Are MPAs effective in removing fishing pressure from benthic habitats and species? Biological Conservation. doi: 10.7489/12270-1

Data and Resources

environment
oceans
fishing effort
Biological diversity maintained
Sea-floor integrity supports ecosystem
FieldValue
Publisher
Fisheries
Modified
2020-03-23
Release Date
2020-03-23
Identifier
63f9ee88-c8ec-4ec7-a9ee-4774207989c3
Spatial / Geographical Coverage Area
POLYGON ((-8.525390625 55.108229702028, -8.525390625 61.505665489145, 0.439453125 61.505665489145, 0.439453125 55.108229702028))
Temporal Coverage
2013-01-01 to 2015-12-31
Language
English (United Kingdom)
License
UK Open Government Licence (OGL)
Author
Marine Scotland
Data Dictionary

The study region:
Spans between mean high water at spring tide and 12 nautical miles around mainland Scotland and associated islands, excluding territorial seas around Rockall. It is based on the Scottish Marine Regions boundaries and was downloaded from Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure Metadata Portal (http://spatialdata.gov.scot/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/...) in June 2018.

MPAs:
Boundaries for SACs and NCMPAs were downloaded from Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) Natural Spaces website (https://gateway.snh.gov.uk/natural-spaces/index.jsp) in June 2018. Only protected sites fully inshore of the 12 nautical mile line were included. NCMPAs and SACs that had no habitats or low-or-reduced mobility species listed as designated features, were removed from the analysis. In total 41 MPAs were included.

MPA Management Measures:
Boundaries for current MPA management measures were downloaded from Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure Metadata Portal (http://spatialdata.gov.scot/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/...) in June 2018.

The boundary datasets for MPAs and MPA management measures were clipped to the study region.

Species points:
The shapefile was created from Redacted - GeMS Version 7 - Priority Marine Features and MPA Search features.mxd downloaded from https://gateway.snh.gov.uk/natural-spaces/dataset.jsp?dsid=GEMS-PMF in Jan 2019

Bottom ruggedness index datasets:
BRI rasters were derived from Oceanwise 1s bathymetry datasets. (Oceanwise bathymetry - Crown copyright 2018. All rights reserved. License number. EK001-20140401. Not to be used for navigation.)
Oceanwise_BRI_SR.tiff is the bottom ruggedness index for the whole study region
DemMobProhib.BRI is the bottom ruggedness index in areas where mobile bottom contacting gear is prohibited.
MPA.BRI.fish is the bottom ruggedness index in areas that are inside MPAs but where some mobile bottom contacting gear is permitted.
out.BRI is the bottom ruggedness index in areas outside MPAs.

Analyses were performed in R version 3.4.2 (R Core Team, 2018). Spatial datasets were transformed into Europe Albers equal area conic projection (https://epsg.io/102013) for area calculations, using the sp package in R (Pebesma and Bivand, 2005). Areas were calculated using the R package rgeos (Bivand and Rundel, 2018).
Contact Name
Marine Scotland Science
Contact Email
marinescotland@gov.scot
Public Access Level
Public