Adapted marine biological valuation concept

This article suggests changes to the marine biological valuation criteria. It is part of a summary of the discussions held during a workshop on marine biological valuation,held from 6 to 8 December 2006 at Ghent (Belgium). The workshop was a joint venture of the EU CA ENCORA (http://www.encora.org) and the EU NoE MARBEF (http://www.marbef.org). Both Theme 7 within ENCORA and Theme 3 within MARBEF deal with marine/coastal biological valuation and the workshop aimed to reach a consensus on this topic.

• The flowchart on the previous page (Selected valuation criteria) should be changed as some criteria are excluded from the concept or lumped together.

• Also the term ‘biological valuation’ should be changed into ‘biodiversity valuation’ as we apply the valuation criteria to different biodiversity elements.

• The new flowchart could be adapted as follows (the indication of ‘local scale’ and ‘ecoregional scale’ means that the valuation of a study area should be done first on a local scale (i.e. value subareas within the study area relatively to each other) and in a next step the same subareas should be valuated on a broader (ecoregional) scale to see if changes in value occur):

Notes

These paragraphs reflect the main discussion outcomes of the ENCORA Theme 7-MARBEF Theme 3 workshop on marine biological valuation (6-8 December 2006, Gent, Belgium)(http://www.marbef.org/documents/Theme3/GhentWS/report.pdf).