Recordings from Baltic Stakeholder Conference 2024

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Updating management guidelines for marine protected areas (MPAs), developing a methodology for management effectiveness assessment and testing it in national case studies. 

Creating high-resolution environmental datasets for the Baltic Sea and project future species and habitat distributions to inform conservation and management strategies. 

Developing a versatile methodology to assess, map and value ecosystem services. The project will inform marine conservation, optimize marine spatial protection for MPAs and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs), and identify key areas for ecosystem service production, demonstrating their socio-economic value and guiding future assessments. 

Assessing and aligning international and EU legal frameworks with Baltic Sea Action Plan targets, evaluating compatibility with directives such as the Birds and Habitats, Marine Strategy Framework, and Common Fisheries Policy. 

Building and updating a regional portal with information on MPAs and OECMs. Employing agile development methods, the process ensures alignment with the needs of MPA managers and users, integrating key functionalities and data models to enhance regional capacity in marine protection. 

Contributing to the development of a Regional Restoration Action Plan and toolbox, highlighting regional priorities, methods, costs, and feasibility in regard to restoration efforts. 

Fostering a shared regional understanding of marine spatial protection, establishing common terminology and setting ecologically relevant protection targets and indicators. It also identifies threats and pressures on ecosystems and assesses the efficiency of existing protection measures. 

Reviewing the existing monitoring systems for marine
spatial protection in the Baltic Sea, exploring innovative monitoring tools and methods, and developing a comprehensive framework and guidelines for the entire MPA network. 

Revising criteria for assessing the coherence of marine spatial protection, aligning them with scientific knowledge and environmental goals, and develops connectivity models to understand species and habitat interactions. The work assesses the MPA network, emphasizing representativity, replication, adequacy, and connectivity, with a focus on species and habitat distribution. 

MPA EUROPE present their results to date on classifying marine ecosystems, modelling species and habitat distributions and mapping blue carbon stores. They will also invite stakeholders to begin to co-identify use cases for their maps, final atlas and results.