Guidelines for the monitoring of marinas.

Abstract

NIS monitoring in major commercial ports has been guided by the Joint Harmonized Procedure of the HELCOM and OSPAR (HELCOM & OSPAR, 2013). However, monitoring of marinas has received less attention until now. PVC fouling plates and scraping samples have been commonly used to detect the presence of fouling species in a variety of coastal environments (Murray et al., 2011; Maraffini et al., 2017; Ulman et al., 2017; Outinen et al., 2019). They provide a standardized sampling method for fouling organisms, including macroinvertebrates and mollusks. Plastic fouling plates provide horizontal attachment surfaces for fouling organisms, whereas a hand-held scraping net can be applied to artificial vertical structures in marinas. The aim of these guidelines is to provide instructions for the sampling of marinas in the Baltic Sea region. As recreational vessels do not use ballast water, the protocol concentrates on the detection of fouling species. The recorded data contributes to the assessment of the HELCOM core indicator ‘Trends in arrival of non-indigenous species’, which compares the regional diversity of NIS at temporal intervals to a baseline and evaluates the status relative to previous intervals.