The political problems include: disagreement among (and within) sectors over policy objectives and priorities, common access to fisheries resources at the EU level increasing the scale at which decisions have to be made and lack of an integrated strategy for implementing protected areas in the North Sea. Drawing on three MPA processes currently occurring in the UK North Sea, we examine the real-world problems that make the designation of MPA networks challenging. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the use of marine protected areas (here defined widely to include fisheries closed areas and no-take marine reserves) in its management has generated considerable controversy-particularly with regards to the design of a regional ecologically coherent MPA network to meet international obligations. The North Sea is one of the most economically important seas in the world due to productive fisheries, extensive oil and gas fields, busy shipping routes, marine renewable energy development and recreational activity. Improving monitoring and data access and increasing understanding of pressure-state relationships, including those that are non-linear, is therefore a priority for enabling future assessments, as is consistent and stable resourcing for expert involvement. The status of many indicators across all ecosystem components, but particularly for the novel pelagic habitats, food webs and NIS indicators, however, remains uncertain due to gaps in data, unclear pressure-state relationships, and the non-linear influence of some pressures on biodiversity indicators. Bright spots are also revealed, such as recent signs of recovery in some fish and marine bird communities and recovery in harbour and grey seal populations and the condition of coastal benthic communities in some regions. The poor biodiversity status of these ecosystem components is likely the result of cumulative effects of human activities, such as habitat destruction or disturbance, overexploitation, eutrophication, the introduction of NIS, and climate change. Our analysis reveals widespread degradation in marine ecosystems and biodiversity, particularly for marine birds and coastal bottlenose dolphins, as well as for benthic habitats and fish in some regions. Here, we expand on this work and for the first time, a semi- quantitative approach is applied to evaluate holistically the state of Northeast Atlantic marine biodiversity across marine food webs, from plankton to top predators, via fish, pelagic and benthic habitats, including xeno- biodiversity (i.e. This assessment examined biodiversity indicators separately to identify changes in Northeast Atlantic biodiversity, but stopped short of determining the status of biodiversity for many species and habitats. In 2017, OSPAR, the Northeast Atlantic Regional Seas Commission, delivered an assessment of marine biodiversity for the Northeast Atlantic. ![]() Nonetheless, this regional sea sup- ports a high diversity of species and habitats, whose functioning provides a variety of ecosystem services, essential for human welfare. ![]() The Northeast Atlantic, a highly productive maritime area, has been exposed to a wide range of direct human pressures, such as fishing, shipping, coastal development, pollution, and non-indigenous species (NIS) in- troductions, in addition to anthropogenically-driven global climate change.
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