IMIS

The aims of the NMMP are:

• To detect long-term trends in physical, biological and chemical variables at selected estuarine and coastal sites to establish if regulatory measures are effective in protecting the marine environment
• To ensure consistent standards in monitoring programmes for marine environmental quality (e.g. OSPAR, EC Directives)
• To make recommendations to the Marine Pollution Monitoring Management Group (MPMMG) as to how new analyses and techniques are best implemented in the UK
• To co-ordinate and optimise marine monitoring in the UK
• To provide and maintain a high quality dataset for key chemical and biological variables in the marine environment of the United Kingdom
• To produce reports providing overviews of the spatial and temporal distributions of these variables and their inter-relationships

The strengths of the NMMP lie in the specified quality of its reported data, its integrated programme for chemistry, biology and biological effects, the direct comparability between sites across the UK, the National Marine Monitoring Database, the effective co-ordination between seven key UK organisations with a statutory interest in the marine environment and its flexible design and implementation. The future strategy for the NMMP involves

• moving from a pollution focus to an environmental management focus, involving a whole ecosystem approach
• integrating current effort with sister programmes of the Countryside Agencies and the NERC Community
• developing robust indicators of performance to measure overall trend rather than measuring individual contaminants (circa 60,000)