Projects

Intertidal and sublittoral survey of islands within the Staffa Island group, Inner Hebrides. September 16 – 20, 2016

The field trip to the Staffa Archipelago was at the invitation of the owners of Inch Kenneth, Little Colonsay, Ulva and Gometra, who are keen to know just what important marine habitats there are in the surrounding waters and the status of the marine life there.
Field trip reports and species lists are usually published in the Society’s Bulletin but for this more extensive and intensive Staffa Archipelago field trip, a more detailed report was deemed appropriate. However, a general report on the diving (Hitchin and Crouch 2017) and the shore recording (Dipper 2017) was published in the spring 2017 Bulletin.

The full report can now be downloaded here: Staffa Island Report

The Deep-sea Conservation for the UK (DCUK) project

This project began in April 2005, with two years of funding from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. The project was developed to provide information on threats to offshore biodiversity, develop practical case studies to help future conservation management and to disseminate this information to a wider public. The project partners were Scottish Association for Marine Science (lead partner), University of Plymouth, National Oceanography Centre, and Marine Biological Association. The project was highly successful and is described in the final report (DCUK, 2007).
The work of DCUK was then continued with another 2 year project (DCUK2) and some changes to the partnership. It was again funded by a grant from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. The project was coordinated at an executive level by the Porcupine Marine Natural History Society (PMNHS) and the other partners were Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), University of Plymouth (UoP), and National Oceanography Centre (NOC).

The DCUK2 project is divided into the following three modules:

• Large-scale habitat classification of the deep-sea realm;
• Predicting the occurrence of vulnerable deep-sea habitats and species and developing international ocean basin scale research on cold-water corals;
• Practical monitoring and management of protected deep-sea areas.

Further information and a full report on the project can be downloaded here as a pdf: DCUK2 Final Report

Essential Guide to Magelonidae Taylor & Mortimer

A Porcupine Marine Natural History Society funded project (Roger Bamber Research Grant), aiming to produce visual identification guides of the Magelonidae for a broad range of users, has now been completed. The first of these guides entitled ‘Collecting Shovel Head Worms on the Shore’ was published in PMNHS Bulletin 18 in Autumn 2022 (Taylor & Mortimer, 2022), and supplementary guides on identification of UK and European species have now been completed. This set of guides aims to provide clarity for those identifying shovel head worms, a polychaete group for which identification based on morphological characters has been made difficult in the past by the variety of terms applied by different taxonomists. The set of guides is available to read and download below.

Citation: Taylor, A. & Mortimer. K. 2023. An essential guide to Magelonidae, UK and European species. Porcupine Marine Natural History Society. http://pmnhs.co.uk/projects