Baltic marine monitoring and nature conservation combined in new HELCOM group

03 November 2014

The first meeting of the new HELCOM working group on the state of the environment and nature conservation in the Baltic Sea, starting today in Pärnu, Estonia, will formulate a concrete work plan regarding the two key themes of the group: monitoring and assessment as well as nature conservation and biodiversity. The 5-day session will discuss, among others, monitoring of benthic habitats, the production of the holistic assessment of the ecosystem health, as well as the modernization of the database on marine protected areas.

The future coordinated monitoring of benthic habitats in the Baltic Sea will be a key topic of the Meeting. The HELCOM Monitoring and Assessment Strategy states that monitoring in the Baltic Sea should cater for assessments of quality and quantity of habitats and biotopes. Still, at present the recently published HELCOM Monitoring Manual shows limited monitoring of benthic habitats in the Baltic Sea thus there is room for improvements and new joint initiatives.

Different tools for assessing biodiversity is another theme that expecting major attention. HELCOM recently agreed to start a project with the aim of producing a 2^nd Holistic Assessment of the Ecosystem Health of the Baltic Sea by 2018. Assessing the state of biodiversity will be an important component of the holistic assessment and principles for such analyses will be considered at the meeting.

Moreover, the modernization of the HELCOM database on marine protected areas (MPA) will be discussed. HELCOM has hosted data on protected areas since 2006 and improvements regarding the structure and contents of the database have now been considered necessary. The new database will include data to cater the assessments of ecological coherence of MPAs, management plans and the effectiveness of managing MPAs.

The current development work on core indicators will also be reflected on, concerning biodiversity, hazardous substances as well as eutrophication. A major overall aim of the State group is to work across the monitoring-indicators-assessment chain in order to provide a stronger basis for coordinated development of the HELCOM thematic assessment tools.

Meeting site. Documents will be public after the meeting.