Predictive habitat maps of the seabed for conservation and management in the Southern Irish Sea and Welsh waters. The HABMAP project used novel modelling techniques, later extended with higher-resolution data to improve accuracy. The dataset is related to predictive modelling work produced by the Government Digital Service.
Use Cases
- Strategic marine planning based on modelled seabed habitat distributions.
- Sensitivity mapping for environmental impact assessments based on predicted habitat types.
- Supporting Marine Protected Area selection based on spatial habitat data.
- Informing decisions for offshore developments based on modelled habitat maps.
Strengths
- Covers a broad geographic area including the Southern Irish Sea, Welsh waters, and the Dee and Severn estuaries.
- Uses higher-resolution input data in its extended version to help increase predictive map accuracy.
- Explicitly designed for practical applications in conservation, management, and strategic planning.
Limitations
- Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- The maps are not appropriate to act as sole evidence for specific planning decisions without further supporting studies.
Provenance
- Source
- Government Digital Service
- Collection Method
- Produced using novel predictive modelling techniques on seabed data.
- Time Range
- null
- Freshness
- Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
- Geography
- Southern Irish Sea, all of Welsh waters, Dee and Severn estuaries, SE Ireland coastline, and parts of the Celtic Sea.