Underpinning marine spatial planning of Blue Carbon resources; Orkney Islands Catchment Audit case study

Orkney Islands is a useful location on which to base a Blue Carbon planning project pilot because it has a variety of Blue Carbon habitats occurring in a discrete area. Some of the habitats are well documented, for others the boundaries are less clear. Habitats include Kelp forests, Maerl beds, Horse Mussel beds, Flame Shell beds, Seagrass meadows, Brittlestar beds and Bryozoan thickets. A recent MASTS funded case study project, allowed a series of workshops to take place, where stakeholders from Orkney and beyond were able to identify key knowledge gaps and opportunities on the topics of Blue Carbon, which may be significant for evidence based future management planning. Some of the gaps identified, were overlapping with interests from the local Marine Planning Team and from Orkney Islands Council interests via the Biodiversity Action Plan. New resources now becoming available from Marine Scotland Science through Scotland Shelf Model and sub domain models, along with outputs from the EPSRC funded ECOWATT 2050 programme mean that some of the identified knowledge gaps could now be addressed to complete an Orkney Islands Blue Carbon Audit as a pilot for Scottish waters.

Significant knowledge gaps include understanding of the fluxes of certain Blue Carbon habitat types. Also the amount of carbon stored in specific but understudied blue carbon habitat types is still not clear, as well as underestimates of some habitats where further field study is needed. Examples include Horse mussel reef depth, maerl reef depth, Flame shell bed depth, Brittlestar bed carbon content and extent, seagrass meadow fluxes, Bryozoan thicket carbon content and flux to name a few. In this project we propose to develop a Carbon Audit for Orkney and Scapa Flow waters, alongside the Orkney Islands Council Marine Planning Team who are developing the regional marine plan. Part of the work will involve developing the approach to the audit using tools from the ECOWATT 2050 project to build an ecosystem model and the other part of the project will involve fieldwork to fill in some of the data gaps in knowledge regarding the specific blue carbon habitats. The Orkney Islands positioned with the Living Laboratory of Scapa Flow provide the ideal location to tackle this first regional Blue Carbon Audit.

We envisage that the project can benefit from and build upon outputs from the recent tender opportunity from Scottish Government on a similar topic area. Other external PhD advisors contributing to this project are Mary Spencer Jones (Natural History Museum London) and Dr Gareth Davies (Aquatera Ltd). They will provide access to specialist facilities for carbon analysis and mapping (respectively).