Monday 28 May 2012

What you can see …..an introduction to the major habitats


The environmental conditions and substratum upon and within which marine organisms live varies; each variant has a certain collection of species associated with it and thus represents a specific habitat.
Habitats are broad scale descriptions which can often be further defined to the biotope level. There are a variety of habitats/biotopes that can be encountered whilst rock pooling around the UK. Descriptions of these can be found within the JNCC marine habitat classification for Britain and Ireland V4.5 www.jncc.gov.uk/MarineHabitatClassification.
For rock pooling the principal division for broad habitat types is between Littoral rock and Littoral sediments; the substratum type and environmental conditions are then further subdivided with the addition of species list to classify the different habitats/biotopes.

Littoral Rock

Littoral Sediment


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