Improving protection given to Priority Marine Features: responses to scoping consultation

6. Do you agree that 12 hours per year is a suitable level to define the fishing footprint?

There were comments made in 41 responses.

The relevant themes identified for this question were:

a) The grid cell size was too coarse for anything other than context

b) There should be no limit on the minimum number of fishing hours included

c) There is no tracking on under 12m vessels which means there could be gaps

Scottish Government response:

Going forward these data layers will be used to provide contextual information about the distribution of fishing activity. The average layers have been published on NMPi with a scale to visualise the variation in fishing effort. It is our view that there needs to be a minimum level of effort for cells to be included and therefore we are satisfied that an average for 12 hours per year for an entire sector of the fleet is reasonable.