The 2013 Habitats Directive Report (aka Article 17 Reporting) is now available on the JNCC website here. This includes all of the information and maps submitted to the European Commission, plus various supporting documents and spreadsheets. It does not include site-level reports and patience is needed to dig through each of the Wales habitats and species feeder reports.

It is not encouraging reading.  Many marine habitats and species, including all the habitats that occur in Carmarthen Bay and Estuaries SAC are classified as inadequate or bad.  We will not know whether these judgments apply to all of this site’s habitat features until Natural Resources Wales publishes site-level reports but there is clearly no room for complacency and management needs to continue to be improved.

There are regulations prohibiting boats over a certain size or capacity from fishing in the 0-6 nautical mile zone around Wales.  At present, there are exceptions to those provisions which allow vessels over the specified size or capacity limits to continue to fish in those areas.

A consultation was undertaken in 2011/12 regarding proposals to remove historic access rights. A number of complex issues arose as a result of the responses received, and subsequent analysis of the same.  The Minister for Natural Resources and Food has decided that a further period of consultation is needed to ensure that the Welsh Government has the fullest possible understanding of the current situation and the possible effects of the proposed removal of these historic access rights.

More information and the consultation document are available here.

A scientific Symposium on the Problems of Small Estuaries was held at Swansea University in April 2013.  It followed on from earlier symposia at the University ‘Problems of a Small Estuary‘ in 1976 which looked as issues affecting small estuaries, in particular the Burry Inlet, and the ‘Burry Inlet and Loughor Estuary Symposium’ in 1996.

A presentation on the EMS set the scene for many of the other contributions.  All the presentations, including the EMS presentation, are available as PDFs here.