National Marine Monitoring Programme (NMMP)

The National Monitoring Plan (now called the National Marine Monitoring Programme) was initiated in the late 1980s to co-ordinate marine monitoring in the United Kingdom between a number of organisations. The NMMP aims to detect long-term trends in the quality of the marine environment, to ensure consistent standards in monitoring, to establish appropriate protective regulatory measures, to co-ordinate and optimise marine monitoring in the UK, and to provide a high quality key dataset for key variables. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is a major funder of the NMMP.

Its work is co-ordinated by the Marine Pollution Management Group with representation from all Government Organisations with statutory marine environmental protection monitoring obligations.

The initial phases of the NMMP were to establish the spatial distribution of contaminants in UK marine waters and to define their biological status. This has involved long-term surveys at estuarine, intermediate and offshore sites to determine the distribution of contaminants in a range of matrices.

Although providing good spatial coverage, intermittent sampling frequency is unable to resolve temporal variability adequately for current and future purposes. Phase 2 of the NMMP includes a temporal trend monitoring survey using automated in-situ instrumentation, capable of deployment at a mooring, for monitoring a range of physico-chemical and environmental variables. These Marine Observations Systems have been developed by Cefas with funding support by Defra for collecting the high-frequency, near real-time data needed for the NMMP.

The Cefas-developed SmartBuoy is one of an array of automated in situ instrumentation systems that can be deployed for extended periods at a mooring. SmartBuoy is currently configured to meet the needs of the NMMP through monitoring plant nutrient concentrations and the response of the ecosystem in terms of phytoplankton growth and species composition. Additional physical measurements are also made to ensure that a full interpretation of the time-series data set is possible. Summary data are returned in near real-time via satellite telemetry with full data sets recovered during servicing of the buoy. Data are published on the Internet to give rapid access to other collaborators and the public.

The NMMP programme is currently being provided with data from four deployment groups, each having a series of linked deployments.