Drivers and aims

Drivers

To meet temporal trend monitoring requirements of the Oslo and Paris Commissions Co-ordinated Environmental Monitoring Programme (CEMP)
To support compliance with EC Directives
To support research and development needs
For local monitoring

To initiate monitoring programmes to detect, with appropriate accuracy, long-term trends in physical, biological and chemical variables at selected estuarine and coastal sites.
To support and ensure consistent standards in national and international monitoring programmes for marine environmental quality (for example: EC Directives, OSPAR).
To make recommendations to the Marine Assessment and Reporting Group (MARG) as to how new analyses and techniques are best implemented in the UK.
To co-ordinate, make optimum use of, and gain maximum information from marine monitoring in the UK.
To provide and maintain a high quality dataset for key chemical and biological variables in the marine environment of the UK.
To produce reports providing overviews of the spatial and temporal distributions of these variables and their inter-relationships.