Third UK Habitats Directive report (2013) - pressures and threats to habitats and species at Country and offshore level
This dataset lists Country and offshore specfic pressures and threats for habitats and species listed under the Habitats Directive. Every six years, all EU Member States are required (under Article 17 of the Directive) to report on the implementation of the EU Habitats Directive. The 3rd UK Habitats Directive Report was submitted to the European Commission in 2013. This report includes the need to report on Pressures and Threats. The main pressures and threats affecting species and habitats were identified and matched against a standard list of pressures and threats set out by the EC. The time period pressures were assessed over was the reporting period 2007-2013, whilst for threats the period was the next two reporting periods, i.e. 2013-2025. The relative importance of pressure and threats was categorised into high, medium and low importance. For pollution pressures and threats the type of pollutant was recorded where known (eg Nitrogen or toxic organic chemicals). The data in this dataset were used as the source data for the integrated UK report. The process involved applying aggregation rules (as described in the lineage section) to produce the UK wide overview of each pressure and threat for each habitat and species.
nonGeographicDataset
name: Habitats-Directive-A17-2013-Country-and-offshore-reporting-info-Pressures-and-threats.csv
d08f2795-cf91-4784-951a-a750bf1bc8d7
eng
biota
Freshwater
Marine
Terrestrial
European Reporting
Article 17
Habitats
Habitats Directive
Species
2007-01-01
2012-12-31
publication
2013-10-21
For each habitat and species , a list of the main pressures currently affecting the habitat/species was identified in each Country and also the offshore environment. These data were collated by the four statutory, country-level, nature conservation bodies – the Countryside Council for Wales (Now known as Natural Resources Wales) , Natural England, Northern Ireland Environment Agency and Department of the Environment (Marine Division), and Scottish Natural Heritage – hereafter referred to as the Statutory Nature Conservation Bodies. This country-level information covered both terrestrial areas and marine inshore waters, depending on the habitat or species concerned. JNCC acted in its fifth agency role for offshore waters, collecting information sets for three marine habitats occurring in UK offshore waters. Country-level and offshore information sets as presented in this dataset were subsequaently combined through an aggregation process carried out by JNCC. These related to the reporting period 2007-2012. The pressure codes/categories were based on a standard list provided via the EC Reporting Guidelines. The full list of EC pressures amounted to 400 separate categories – for UK reporting purposes only the second-level of categories were used, which reduced the list to 79 categories. The time period pressures were assessed over was the reporting period 2007-2013, whilst for threats the period was the next two reporting periods, i.e. 2013-2025. Only those threats that were considered reasonably likely to occur were considered. The relative importance of pressure and threats was categorised as follows: · H = High importance/impact (important direct or immediate influence and/or acting over large area); · M = Medium importance/impact (medium direct or immediate influence, mainly indirect influence and/or acting over moderate part of the area/acting only regionally); · L = Low importance/impact (low direct or immediate influence, indirect influence and/or acting over small part of the area/acting only regionally). In some cases, a pollution qualifier was identified [these were optional to report on]. The qualifiers used were: · N = Nitrogen input;· P = Phosphor/Phosphate input;· A = Acid input/ acidification;· T = toxic inorganic chemicals;· O = toxic organic chemicals;· X = Mixed pollutants. The Statutory Nature Conservation Bodies used data from a variety of sources when assessing pressures and threats, for example: the adverse factors reported as part of the Common Standards Monitoring site condition assessment process; current factors affecting the status of the UK BAP priority species as listed in their Habitat Action Plans; data on specific pressures, and expert knowledge. For mobile marine species, pressure rankings were based on ‘expert opinion’ gathered through the Inter Agency Marine Mammals Working Group to assign a UK-level ranking. For pressures, the method used was classified as: · based exclusively or to a larger extent on real data from sites/occurrences or other data sources; · mainly based on expert judgement and other data; · based only on expert judgements. For threats, the method used was categorised as being based mainly on modelling or expert opinion. The responses for ‘method used’ were combined at a UK-level, after weighting them according to the proportion of the species population found in each country. For 41 habitats, where a specific method was applied to take account of air pollution impacts (see Appendix 6 for details), a different approach was taken to the listing of: (i) pressure code ‘H04 Air pollution, air-borne pollutants’; and (ii) pollution qualifiers for Nitrogen (N) and Acid (A) input. In these cases, nutrient Nitrogen critical load exceedance data for current deposition was used to rank code H04 and list N as a pollution qualifier, depending on the area of habitat where the nutrient N critical load was exceeded:
Comma Separated Values
Unknown
Released under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Attribution statement: "Contains public sector data © JNCC/NE/NRW/SNH/DOENI. Licence: OGL"
no limitations
Digital and Data Solutions, JNCC
custodian
Digital and Data Solutions, JNCC
pointOfContact
2018-05-17