MY FISHERIES contacts in Scotland are ruing the fact that little is being done to protect the rich reef systems that surround submarine mountains rising from the deep north Atlantic floor. Spanish and French trawlers continue to dredge these structures, so I asked ministers at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what their department was doing to protect two specific seamounts, namely the Anton Dohrn and the Rosemary Bank to the west of Scotland.
Ben Bradshaw, the minister with responsibility for biodiversity and fisheries, replied that seamounts are not at present among the habitats listed in the European Union鈥檚 Habitats Directive for which special areas of conservation (SACs) can be designated. Seamounts can support habitats such as reefs that are listed on the annex, but we do not have enough biological information about the Anton Dohrn and Rosemary Bank seamounts to be able to assess whether they meet the site selection criteria for designing them as SACs, Bradshaw said.
But seamounts are on the initial list of threatened and/or declining habitats and supporting species in Annex 5 of the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR), which environment ministers agreed in Bremen, Germany, in June 2003, Bradshaw added. And work is progressing for signatories to the convention to agree appropriate management measures to extend the selection of habitats and species on this list. Such measures could well include marine protected areas, he said.
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Seamounts are of course tempting targets for any greedy fisheries, so the sooner OSPAR comes to a decision, the better.
WIND farms can have a dire effect on military and civil aviation because reflections from their giant turbine blades interfere with the images on air traffic control and even defence radar screens on the ground (快猫短视频, 6 December 2003, p 30). With the expected growth in offshore wind farms around the UK鈥檚 coast, this matter is of increasing concern to the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
Ivor Caplin, the MoD minister covering environmental issues, tells me that through a working group focusing on wind energy, defence and civil aviation interests, the MoD has commissioned the defence and security company Qinetiq to investigate the feasibility of developing wind turbine blades that are invisible to radar.
The Department of Trade and Industry, the Civil Aviation Authority and the British Wind Energy Association also played a part in commissioning the report. The University of Sheffield is also investigating the technology of radar-invisible turbine blades.
The working group hopes to test software technology that can be applied to radar to mitigate some of the adverse effects of turbine blades. The MoD expects to take a major role in testing the technology, Caplin said. He added that his officials would be pleased to meet any manufacturers of wind turbine blades to discuss the radar issues.
