The Marine Institute successfully bid for
PANACHE, an
EU INTERREG Priority 4 Objective 2 project with a global budget of €4.8 million. The aim of PANACHE was to develop a stronger and more coherent approach to the management, monitoring and involvement of stakeholders for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the Channel. There are significant efforts taking place in England and France to utilise MPAs to meet European and International biodiversity protection obligations; this project provided a mechanism to ensure that approaches being taken on both sides of the Channel are more coherent and effective. The project brought together 14 partners with technical, stakeholder engagement and management expertise and was led by the French MPA Agency.
This project closely aligned with
VALMER and together both projects focused on improved management, sustainable use and protection of the Channel marine area. PANACHE aimed to enable a common approach to the way that MPAs are managed, monitored, and also looked at MPAs on a regional scale to evaluate whether the current and proposed network of areas meets ecological coherence criteria. It jointly developed a programme of stakeholder awareness and citizen science across the Channel area that aimed to increase awareness of MPAs amongst key community and stakeholder groups. In delivering these objectives, the project sought to build much closer co-operation between English and French government agencies, scientific institutions, private enterprises and voluntary organisations.
Two key PANACHE work packages were led by staff from the Marine Institute. Dr Emma Jackson developed a methodology to enable the existing MPA network to be assessed for its ecological coherence criteria established in science and international convention. Dr Sian Rees, Dr Emma Sheehan and Dr Lynda Rodwell built upon their experience of the ecological and socio-economic monitoring of Marine Protected Areas in the UK to work towards developing a transferable approach to monitoring MPAs in the Channel area.
Professor Martin Attrill, Director of the Marine Institute stated that,
“Involvement in the PANACHE project will build on the expertise of the MI research staff in the planning and management of MPAs, enable European collaboration and raise our profile as leaders in the development of methodologies for MPA monitoring and assessing ecological coherence.”
