Abstract

Maintaining biodiversity is a central tenet of wildlife conservation. To conserve marine life, information on the ‘resource’ (the habitats, communities and species) needs to be collected and used in a structured way in order to identify the nature conservation importance of sites and to manage areas to conserve their important features. This includes the organisation of descriptive data through systems of classification and the establishment of criteria for assessing the nature conservation importance of locations. Management requires information on the functioning of marine ecosystems, but especially an understanding of how vulnerable particular habitats, communities and species are to different activities being undertaken in the area. Research needs to tackle some difficult applied questions that will not always suit the requirements of publishing and of short project length.

Introduction

‘Nature conservation’ is defined here as: ‘the regulation of human use of the global ecosystem to sustain its diversity of content indefinitely’ (NCC, 1984). Conservation requires information on the resource and a structured approach to decision-making so that actions are soundly based and defensible. Conserving biodiversity also requires political initiatives and will. Recent such initiatives have included the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity (published in Britain by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1995) and the European Communities Directive on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora (Council of the European Communities, 1992).