The challenge & why we’re doing this
The UK’s marine environment is shaped by a wide range of pressures flowing in from land, rivers, and human activity at sea.
Nutrients, sediments, contaminants, and plastics move through the catchment-to-coast system, while fishing pressure, seabed disturbance, and offshore activity further influence marine condition. The result is a complex system where:
- Causes and impacts are often poorly connected
- Data is fragmented across organisations
- The overall state of the marine environment is difficult to interpret
The Good Environmental Status (GES) framework provides a comprehensive way of understanding marine health - covering biodiversity, food webs, water quality, seabed condition, contaminants, and human pressures.
However, in practice, these elements are rarely brought together into a single, place-based picture. This makes it harder to:
- Identify the most important pressures
- Prioritise effective interventions
- Engage communities and stakeholders
- Unlock funding for large-scale restoration
Our aim is to change this — by making the marine system visible, understandable, and actionable.
What we’re doing
Through the Smart Biosphere, we are developing a Marine Environmental Intelligence approach focused on connecting system pressures to marine condition, and making this accessible through clear public dashboards.
The focus is on creating the data, insight, and engagement platform that enables restoration projects to happen at scale.
This work brings together four key elements:
Mapping system pressures (catchment → coast → sea). We integrate data on the main pressures affecting the marine environment, including:
- Nutrient and sediment runoff from land
- Wastewater and storm overflow discharges
- Contaminants entering through rivers and estuaries
- Marine litter and plastics
- Fishing activity and seabed disturbance
- Offshore activity and underwater noise
This creates a joined-up view of how pressures move through the system, linking upstream activity to marine outcomes.
Structuring marine condition using GES. We use the 11 Good Environmental Status categories to organise and interpret data, including:
- Biodiversity and habitats
- Fish and shellfish populations
- Food webs and ecosystem function
- Eutrophication and water quality
- Seabed integrity
- Contaminants, litter, and underwater noise
This provides a consistent, system-wide framework for understanding marine health.
Building public-facing dashboards. We are developing accessible marine dashboards that bring this information together in one place, showing:
- Current condition across GES categories
- Key pressures and where they come from
- How the system is changing over time
The aim is to make the marine environment legible to communities, stakeholders, and decision-makers.
Enabling action, coordination, and investment. By connecting pressures, condition, and trends, the system provides a foundation to:
- Support coordinated action across regulators, fisheries, and conservation partners
- Identify priority areas for restoration and protection
- Link marine outcomes to catchment and coastal interventions
- Build credible, evidence-based cases for investment (including offshore wind and blue finance)
What this enables
This approach creates the conditions for system-scale marine restoration by:
- Clarifying cause and effect - linking land, river, and marine pressures to ecological outcomes
- Focusing effort - identifying where interventions will have the greatest impact
- Strengthening engagement - making marine issues visible and relevant to communities and stakeholders
- Supporting investment - providing the transparency and evidence needed to unlock funding at scale
- Connecting to wider system change - aligning marine restoration with water quality, land use, and climate adaptation
Expected outputs
This work will deliver:
- A Marine Environmental Intelligence Dashboard - integrating data on pressures, pathways, and marine condition
- GES-based assessment of marine status - a clear, structured view across all aspects of marine health
- Pressure-to-impact analysis - understanding how catchment and coastal activity influences the marine environment
- Greater transparency and engagement - making marine conditions visible to communities and stakeholders
- A platform for restoration and investment - supporting the development of larger-scale marine recovery programmes
- A replicable model - an approach that can be applied in other coastal areas across the UK
Get involved
We are developing this approach and are keen to work with partners who want to shape or apply it.
If you are:
- A marine, fisheries, or coastal organisation
- A regulator or public body
- A catchment partner influencing coastal water quality
- A business or investor interested in marine restoration
- Exploring similar approaches elsewhere in the UK
We’d love to hear from you: naturalcapital@devon.gov.uk
