UK-Netherlands collaborative monitoring programme
This is a joint UK-Netherlands monitoring programme in the
Southern North Sea designed to improve our understanding of
environmental variability and ecosystem functioning. It represents
a further step towards creating a co-ordinated monitoring network
for the North Sea. It will integrate both temporal
measurements, through instrumented buoy deployments, and
spatial
measurements, through the deployment of towed
instruments. The aim of the programme is to better determine
spatial and temporal variability in the critical environmental
variables such as suspended particle load, nutrient concentration
and phytoplankton biomass with a view to providing improved
measures of ecosystem health, to provide high-frequency datasets on
the plankton and the physico-chemical control variables and to
provide datasets for the improved parameterisation and testing of
ecosystem models.
This programme of deployment of our Smart Moorings in Dutch
coastal waters builds on the success of earlier work which has now
firmly established a close working relationship between Cefas and
the Netherlands Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) and its laboratory the
National Institute for Coastal and Marine Management (RIKZ).
With funding from the UK (Defra) and Netherlands governments,
Cefas and RIKZ are jointly operating a SmartBuoy to measure the
rapidly changing environmental conditions in Dutch coastal waters.
The buoy is sited in the highly dynamic water in a region of
freshwater influence (ROFI) in the vicinity of the Rhine outflow.
The SmartBuoy has been deployed at several sites offshore from
Noordwijk ann Zee. All locations are Netherlands standard
monitoring sites and will allow comparison of the measurements
obtained from the standard methods employed in a ship-based
monitoring programme with the automated in situ SmartBuoy data. In
addition, the results will allow assessment of the causes and
effects of the rapidly changing environmental conditions in this
area.