Marine

Welcome to the Coastal and Ecosystem Monitoring Blog

September 30, 2010 by admin No Comments | Category Marine Directorate Science

In this blog we aim to provide the readers with up to date information about the type of activities that are carried out to conduct long term monitoring around the seas of Scotland, and in particular focusing on the high-frequency coastal monitoring sites.

As the term “long-term monitoring” indicates, the efforts and results coming from this work may not be immediately useful. In fact, some of the questions about the variability in oceans act on scales of years, decades, and even centuries. So in order to build an understanding of what the patterns are in our seas around Scotland, it is often necessary to collect the data for several years before we can start analysing and reporting the results.

Marine Scotland is in the process of rebuilding the web pages that will provide you with more details about individual sites, and the data collected at those sites. The aim of the blog is to focus on what is going on in the sea right now. Due to the location of Marine Scotland Science in Aberdeen, most examples will come from work conducted just off Stonehaven, south of Aberdeen. There are many other monitoring sites around Scotland, where similar types of work are done, and we are helped by a network of volunteers without whom, the amount of data collected would be much lower.

Map of coastal monitoring stations

Whenever possible, we will provide readers with photos and text about the type of work done, why its done, and what we see in the samples. We aim to cover a wide range of the information collected such as sea water characteristics, water chemistry, and the planktonic organisms sampled.

In addition to these posts, telling the readers about the day-to-day work, we will occasionally provide background posts which gives a bit more detail about what we measure and how it connects the the oceans around us, not just the little spot in which we sample.

We hope that everyone will enjoy reading the blog, either from an interest in science, or to improve their understanding of how the ocean and marine ecosystem works and cycles. We accept comments on the site, and although we do moderate and approve the comments before they are published, we will welcome feedback!

Tags: Ecosystem, Marine biology, Monitoring

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