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Restoration & Enhancement

Restoration & Enhancement

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Restoration & Enhancement
Restoration & Enhancement

How should I assess the baseline?

As part of your work on baseline please do consider crucial elements such as permissions and biosecurity. You can find more information on both in the ‘Permissions’ section.

The first step in deciding what is best in your chosen location is to undertake a baseline survey – to begin with this shouldn’t be overly complex or expensive. Simply, taking all sensible safety precautions, walk the area around low tide and look for what is already there, look out for healthy sites of key species such as seagrass or native oysters, look for signs of previous populations such as old native oyster shell, take photos and use resources such as i-spot and i-naturalist to identify as much as you can.

Once you have an idea of what is there you can start to compare to historic records and other survey data (see separate sections relating to key species). Make sure you make good use of the Scottish Government’s own data set at National Marine Plan Interactive (NMPi).

If you do find that you are looking at an area which is protected in some way seek advice from NatureScot so they can advise you about the site and what the protections mean for your project.

More information about survey can be found in our monitoring section.

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