Working Group on Marine Habitat Mapping (WGMHM; outputs from 2024 meeting)

The Working Group on Marine Habitat Mapping (WGMHM) is focused on the development and coordination of the marine habitat mapping of the marine ecosystems, reviewing new methods and techniques, identifying current caveats and proposing solutions to enhance the use of these techniques on ICES advice.

The current report summarises the activities of the group during 2024 when the group work on five different ToRs. During this year, the group has reviewed new methods and advances in marine habitat mapping such as the use of drones to map littoral habitats, the application of different model approaches to delineate habitat loss for biological habitats or the use of these models to forecast the impact of climate change on vulnerable marine ecosystems. Furthermore, current and new potential applications of these models were also discussed, such as the use of these models to predict the distribution of marine biodiversity in the Baltic Sea or to analyse by modelling prey distribution (sandeels) the effectiveness of protective spatial measures of sea bird colonies. The current caveats and limitations of these models that prevent a more extended use of their outputs in advice were also discussed and identified, proposing several potential solutions to them.