Crown

National Scenic Areas (NSAs) are Scotland's only national landscape designation, and defined as areas “of outstanding scenic value in a national context” for which special protection measures are required. The designation’s purpose is both to identify our finest scenery and to ensure its protection from inappropriate development. NSAs are broadly equivalent to the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty found in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. They are regarded by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as Category V Protected Landscapes. There are 40 NSAs in total covering roughly 1 million hectares (13% of Scotland).

The stock assessments of crabs and lobster use official landings data (as shown in this data layer), which provide location of capture (ICES rectangle), the species and the weight landed into ports in Scotland. These data are collated by Marine Scotland Compliance from sales notes and EU logbook and FISH1 forms, and are held in the Marine Scotland Fisheries Information Network (FIN) database and in the Marine Scotland Science (MSS) Fisheries Management Database (FMD).

This layer depicts landings of velvet crab (Necora puber) into Scotland.

For assessment purposes, the Scottish creel fishing grounds are divided into 12 assessment areas. Some Scottish assessment areas extend outside Scottish Territorial Waters. On the east of Scotland the South East assessment area extends beyond the Scottish border, while on the west coast, the Clyde assessment area stops short of the Irish border. There is some fishing on grounds outside the assessment areas. Currently these areas support only small fisheries and landings data are monitored for any change in importance.

Derived from Thomas, H.J., 1958. Lobster and crab fisheries in Scotland. Marine Research, 8: 107 and subsequently revised to include two offshore areas – Papa, which lies to the west of Shetland, and Sule, which is to the north and west of Orkney and includes Rona, Sulisker and Sule-Skerry banks.

These data underpin Figure 3, Table 3 and Appendix B of Willem B. Buddendorf, Faye L. Jackson, Iain A. Malcolm, Karen J. Millidine, Josie Geris, Mark E. Wilkinson, Chris Soulsby (2019), Integration of juvenile habitat quality and river connectivity models to understand and prioritise the management of barriers for Atlantic salmon populations across spatial scales. STOTEN (2019), 655, 557-566. The data show the increase in river connectivity that would result from the removal of impassable manmade barriers (IMBS) and thus provides a basis for assessing the impact of barriers on Atlantic salmon and the potential benefits of barrier removal / easement. By ranking the connectivity scores it has been possible to develop an approach for prioritising management action.

The connectivity metric "Delta DCIScot(%)" is the percentage increase in national connectivity that is obtained where a barrier is removed, assuming all barriers downstream have also been removed. Cumulative gain is the potential gain in delta DCIScot if this barrier and all downstream IMBs are removed; if there are no IMBs downstream then cumulative gain is equal to delta DCIScot. The connectivity metric used here is weighted by predicted salmon fry density obtained from the benchmark model presented by Iain A. Malcolm, Karen J. Millidine, Ross S. Glover, Faye L. Jackson, Colin P. Millar, Robert J. Fryer (2019), Development of a large-scale juvenile density model to inform the assessment and management of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) populations in Scotland. Ecological Indicators, Volume 96, Part 1, 2019, Pages 303-316. This contrasts with other approaches where the weighting is based on wetted areas or river length.