Science Evidence Data and Digital Portfolio Annual Report 2024 - 2025

Highlights across the delivery areas 2024-25:

• We led on responding to 35% (97 of 276) of the Environmental Information Requests (EIR) handled by Marine Directorate from January 2024 to end March 2025.
• Our seagoers spent 526 days at sea covering 50,021 nautical miles on Marine Research Vessels (MRV) Scotia and MRV Alba na Mara, hosting 173 SEDD staff and 37 visitors.
• The Scottish Coastal Observatory (SCObs) monitoring programme collected physical, chemical and biological samples for statutory environmental reporting and assessment. Continuous temperature data were recorded at 10 sites around the coast, Motor Vessel (MV) Temora made 39 visits to the SCObs monitoring site at Stonehaven and a further 200 sampling events took place at Loch Ewe, Scapa, Scalloway and St. Abbs. Our taxonomic experts analysed 88 plankton samples from the SCObs sites at Stonehaven and Loch Ewe.
• A total of 727 Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) stations were sampled by our seagoing teams, made up of 393 on oceanographic surveys and 334 on other SEDD surveys. Our CTD data were shared through the Global Telecommunications System (GTS) within the framework of the World Weather Watch and are used by the wider community such the UK Met Office for data assimilation in coupled ocean-atmosphere models forecasts.
• Our lab-based scientists analysed 1951 nutrients samples, made up of 570 from the Clean Seas Environmental Monitoring Programme (CSEMP) surveys, 248 from the SCObs sites, 1031 from oceanographic surveys and 102 from other SEDD surveys.
• Our lab-based scientists analysed 1037 marine chlorophyll samples, made up of 26 from the CSEMP surveys, 232 from the SCObs sites, 847 from oceanographic surveys and 132 from other SEDD surveys.
• Our lab-based scientists analysed 1570 marine salinity samples, made up of 332 from SCObs sites, 582 from oceanographic surveys and 656 from other SEDD surveys.
• Our lab-based scientists analysed 1036 marine dissolved oxygen samples, made up of 344 from the SCObs sites, 598 from oceanographic surveys and 94 from other SEDD surveys.
• Our seagoing scientists collected 390 total alkalinity (TA) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) marine samples: 354 samples collected from the SCObs sites, 36 samples from oceanographic surveys.
• Our researchers have presented at numerous international conferences and workshops.
• Our scientists chaired, co-chaired and contributed to a wide range of International

Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) working groups leading to various ICES reports underpinning marine and freshwater policy development across Marine Directorate.

• Our researchers published numerous scientific reports, peer review papers, data sets and official statistics reports arising from the wide-ranging research underpinning marine and freshwater policy development across the Directorate.
• We increased our international leadership of marine and freshwater science by chairing 4 additional ICES expert groups, hosting multiple working groups and workshops and taking on UK representation of the ICES Advisory Committee and providing support and input to the UK Delegation for the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (NASCO) Committee.
• Our experts provided scientific support for the successful defence of the EU’s challenge of the decision to close the sandeel fishery in Scottish Waters at the arbitration hearing in The Hague.
• The ECOCHANGE project, investigating the impacts of offshore wind developments on marine food webs, kicked off at the beginning of 2025. This project will receive around

£1.7m in funding, £1.3m of which is from external funding.

• MD has been involved as project partner in two projects funded by The Crown Estates Offshore Wind Evidence and Change programme (OWEC).

I. The first project, led by Cefas, was the ‘Fisheries Sensitivity Mapping and Displacement Modelling (FiSMaDiM)’ project which created fisheries sensitivity maps showing areas of high importance for commercial fishing and areas of potential spatial conflict between offshore wind and commercial fisheries. The project has created a webtool showing spatial layers that can improve the planning of offshore wind and also the best available dataset on commercial fishing activity in the UK.

II. The second project, was the ‘Floating Offshore Wind Environmental Response to Stressors (FLOWERS)’ project, has collected in-situ EMF emission measurements from offshore wind farm export cables at landfall, the first measurements of their kind, to better assess the impact of EMFs from subsea power cables on the marine environment.

• As part of the ScotMER funded North Coast Project 2318 detections of fish were recorded on 40 acoustic receivers which were deployed off the north-west coast of Scotland from February to August 2024. Fish were tagged as part of the Atlantic Salmon Trust in partnership with Grosvenor’s Reay Forest Estate, Zoological Society of London and SG-MD Sea Lice projects. The project aims to determine the spatial and temporal distribution of salmon in the marine environment and the potential for interaction with renewable infrastructure.
• Our lab-based scientists at the Freshwater Laboratory prepared 864 trout DNA samples for double digest restriction-site associated (ddRAD) DNA sequencing, and prepared and analysed 51 samples for sex marker analysis. The main body of work by the lab this year was preparing and genotyping 9,936 samples generating over 953 thousand data points.
• Our lab-based scientists analysed 520 upland water samples in support of fisheries data collected at key SEDD: Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries index sites.
• We collected, collated, quality controlled and reported on river temperature data from > 220 sites across Scotland (including > 7,708,800 measurements), working in collaboration with local fisheries managers for the Scottish River Temperature Monitoring Network (SRTMN).
• Our lab-based scientists analysed over 300 scale samples from returning wild adult Atlantic salmon and contributed over 2000 new images to the digital archive.

In the next section of this Report, the key areas of work for each delivery area are outlined. Where appropriate, highlights and case studies are provided to help demonstrate innovation within the delivery of projects that fall under the high-level objectives set out in the MD Annual Delivery Plan 2024-2025.