The shore and inshore waters from St Abbs Head to Alnmouth, including the Farne Islands, comprise an area of unusually high marine habitat diversity which is of international importance under Annex I of the Habitats Directive. The site has been selected for its extensive and diverse reef habitats, range of littoral mudflat and sandflat communities, and submerged and partly submerged sea caves. It is a mandatory requirement of SACs that monitoring of a site is carried out (site condition monitoring) to identify deterioration in the condition of the feature(s) for which the cSAC has been established.
The purpose of this survey was to initiate site condition monitoring of the Submerged or Partly Submerged Sea Caves feature of the Berwickshire and North Northumberland Coast cSAC. Under a Memorandum of Agreement with English Nature the survey included specified sublittoral cave locations throughout the cSAC, but the littoral component of the monitoring work was to only cover the Scottish sector of the site. The approach taken was to establish a series of relocatable profile stations within selected cave or tunnel sites, reflecting the biological and environmental diversity of the cave feature. The aim being to build on previous Berwickshire and North Northumberland cave studies, with the main emphasis on establishing re-locatable monitoring stations and gathering field data from each station at a Phase 2 level.
