Accurate and extensive marine habitat maps are fundamental to support a wide variety of marine policies and ambitions. These include the European Union’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive and policies to deliver the ambitious plans of the European Green Deal. The simultaneous scaling-up of sustainable Blue Economy activities, while protecting and restoring marine ecosystems as part of the EU 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and the proposed Nature Restoration Law will require increased knowledge of marine habitats. Marine habitat mapping aims to create a holistic representation of the distribution of marine habitats in space and time, and provide insight into associated biological communities, ecological status and condition, and physical properties. Habitat maps are valuable spatial decision-support tools that inform the sustainable use of marine space when using an ecosystem-based approach. They can be used to assess the impact of anthropogenic pressures on marine resources and ecosystem services, to identify and plan new networks of marine protected areas and areas for restoration, and to inform maritime spatial planning. However, large areas remain unmapped and current maps predominantly focus on physical aspects of marine habitats and lack sufficient biological resolution, such as species and communities. Higher resolution maps are needed to better represent the linkages between the seabed and water column in three dimensions and to enable an ecosystem approach to mapping that considers the marine environment in the fourth dimension, capturing the timing of important ecological processes.
This Future Science Brief highlights science and policy needs and recommendations to advance marine habitat mapping in order to fulfil European and international ambitions for biodiversity, conservation, restoration and climate. It primarily targets policymakers, programme managers, research funders and the wider science-policy and scientific communities. It highlights current methods and future trends in the acquisition of data from the seabed and water column via remote sensing and direct, in situ techniques, combining data to produce maps using modelling approaches, and recommendations for adopting fit-for-purpose classification schemes. It provides an overview of what has been mapped and where within the European sea-basins, highlights the need to increase the quality and resolution of marine habitat maps, and identifies critical gaps in habitat types and geographic extent, including the deep sea, Natura 2000 sites and other Marine Protected Areas across all regional seas. Finally, it describes the need to improve the assessment and communication of uncertainty and confidence in maps, and for maps to be more easily accessible to a variety of stakeholders to increase their value for end-users and to the public for Ocean literacy.
To address policy needs and increase the capacity for the production and dissemination of accurate marine habitat maps, we recommend scientists/map producers and research funders to:
• Support multidisciplinary national and EU research projects to advance novel methods to increase the resolution of biological information within marine habitat mapping;
• Support national and EU research programmes that focus on repeat mapping to understand temporal change, particularly of ecologically significant spatial units, i.e. hot spots of ecosystem functioning where high rates of change are expected;
• Promote the standardisation of mapping methods and outputs in research and mapping programmes;
• Promote and incentivise research and mapping programmes to publish marine habitat mapping data according to the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable principles and to submit data to centralised data services;
• Support public-private research collaboration for the development of cost-effective mapping tools; and
• Support dedicated mapping projects focusing on citizen science and reformatting mapping products that promote Ocean Literacy.