Publication Abstract

There has been an increasing demand for habitat maps to improve our spatial awareness
of the marine environment and so support the decision making process in
marine management and spatial planning. Habitat Mapping can take two forms,
mapping the distribution of habitat/biotope classes defined a priori in some classification
scheme (e.g. the marine section of EUNIS, the European Nature Information System
habitat classification) or mapping the geographical distribution of biodiversity
assets (e.g. species or communities) of interest. Both forms of mapping are amenable
to direct or predictive mapping. Where direct mapping plots actual observations,
predictive mapping shows where habitats or species are likely to occur based on our
knowledge of the ‘preference’ that a habitat or a species has for a given set of environmental
conditions; so‐called ‘habitat suitability modelling’. Predictive mapping is
being pushed to the fore as a consequence of limited resources for observational
mapping and the immediacy of the need for information to underpin management
decisions. This session looked across the range of these approaches, to highlight areas
of difficulty, innovation or new knowledge that would improve our ability to assess
and monitor the benthic environment