Rocky reef (Credit Mark Thomas)
The North Sea hosts some spectacular rocky reefs supporting carpets of attaching marine wildlife.
Prickly sea urchin are slow moving, grazing on a feast of seaweed salad.
Coquet to St Mary's stretches for 198.75km2 along the Northumberland coastline and includes both Coquet Island, important for breeding and foraging seabirds and grey seals, alongside St Mary's Island, important for its rocky reefs and crustaceans.
The seafloor, which reaches 30 metres in depth, consists of a mosaic of habitats. These include three different rocky habitats, interspersed with mixed sediments, unique shoreline underboulder communities and estuarine rocky habitats. All of these support thousands of seabirds and marine mammals, including 90% of the UK Roseate tern population, harbour porpoises, white-beaked dolphins, and species of whale. This area is a real gem.
This recommended Marine Conservation Zone is ON HOLD at the moment as Defra has indicated that there is not enough evidence to support designation.
We need you to urge Defra to commit to gathering additional data and to consider designation of this site in a future tranche:
This site is on hold at the moment. Although Defra has indicated that there is enough evidence to support designation of the site for two of the features recommended for protection by stakeholders, they need additional evidence for twelve of the habitats and species recommended. This site provides the largest area of high energy infralittoral rock in the whole MCZ project area and the second largest area of moderate energy infralittoral rock.
We need you to urge Defra to designate this site as soon as possible for those features that are deemed to have sufficient evidence and to commit to gathering additional data for designation of those remaining features.
Contains UKHO Law of the Sea data. Crown copyright and database right and contains Ordnance Survey Data Crown copyright and database 2012
Other nearby MCZs
Downloads
| Filename | File size |
|---|---|
| Coquet to St Mary’s.pdf | 247.42 KB |