Question reference: S5W-36190
- Asked by: Mark Ruskell, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Green Party
- Date lodged: 11 March 2021
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Current status: Answered by Ben Macpherson on 23 March 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government, in light of Marine Scotland stating that its model for determining whether cetaceans can be maintained at Favourable Conservation Status within each SCANS-III block relies on the assumption that cetaceans are evenly distributed over the seabed, whether Marine Scotland has considered evidence that porpoises are not evenly distributed and that the habitats predicted to be of most importance to porpoises in the absence of acoustic deterrent devices (ADDs) are also the areas where fish farms are located with historic use of ADDs, and whether Marine Scotland will revise its model in light of any such evidence.
Answer
SCANS-III outputs represent the most recent synoptic estimates of cetacean absolute densities for UK waters (Hammond et al., 2017) and are the best available information at this time. The resolution of these estimates, in large regional blocks, is relatively coarse, but no other data source currently available can provide absolute densities for all of the areas of interest.
Should finer resolution density maps covering each SCANS-III block become available then we will carefully consider whether it is more appropriate to use these in the future.