Loch Maddy has been established as a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) as it is considered to provide outstanding examples of the following qualifying features:
- large shallow inlet and bays;
- saline lagoons;
- intertidal and sublittoral reefs;
- intertidal sediment flats;
- subtidal sandbanks.
It is a mandatory requirement of SACs that monitoring of a site is carried out (site condition monitoring) to identify changes in the condition of the features for which the SAC has been established and the purpose of the current study was to initiate such a monitoring programme. This was done to establish a baseline
biological data set that would facilitate the assessment of the condition of the habitats in the future and to allow a judgement to be formed on the current condition of these habitats. The main approach taken to achieve these objectives was to perform a drop-down video survey of the biotopes of the SAC, concentrating
on the sublittoral sediments, to characterize the infauna of the main sediment biotopes by means of grab and core sampling and to perform surveys of the epibiota of rock, lagoon, maerl and Zostera biotopes along relocatable transects.
