Habitat area as an indicator of Good Environmental Status under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive: the identification of suitable habitat mapping methods with recommendations on best-practice for the reduction of uncertainty

The overarching goal of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) (2008/56/EC) is to achieve ‘Good Environmental Status’ (GES) by 2020 across the marine environment of Europe. The Commission Decision of September 2010 on criteria and methodological standards on GES of marine waters (2010/477/EU) describes the required criteria and indicators that Member States must develop. One of these indicators is ‘habitat area’ (termed extent within this report). The practicalities of using extent indicators were recently examined by Frost et al. (2013). The main findings were that many technical and ecological issues, impacting on uncertainty and repeatability, need to be resolved before an extent indicator can be made operational. Addressing and reducing many of the technical issues was the principle aim of this project.