Environment in Focus Vol 1.

3. Results

During the workshop held for the present study, the authors volunteered to participate in the subsequent report-writing and thus self-nomination avoided any conflict of interest. The results of the workshop are as follows:

3.1 Habitats

Figure 4: Screen shot from the SOME web-based software (appendix 1), showing a list of known or ex- pected habitats in the Raet Park region, with scores for condition (white boxes), trend (arrows or horizon- tal line) and confidence (coloured squares) produced using GRID-Arendal’s web-based system (appendix 1). The solid black line represents the range in condition scores from the worst 10 per cent to the best 10 per cent for the specified habitat. See Table 1 (appendix 2) for grading statements used to derive the scores. Scores were not provided for habitats where the ex- perts considered there to be insufficient information or evidence available to make an assessment. Hov- ekilen is the name of an embayment within the Raet Park (on Tromøy Island; Figure 1), commonly frequent- ed by tourists and leisure boaters. The “i” symbol is a weblink to text data entered by the rapporteur relevant to the parameter and discussion of the experts. Of the 17 habitats thought to potentially exist in the Raet Park that were identified prior to the EE workshop (Knutsenet al., 2010; Dahl et al., 2014), theparticipating experts considered that there was sufficient evidence to provide an assessment for only eight of them (Figure 4). The nine habitats not assessed were: anoxic soft bottom; anoxic hard bottom; coral; aphotic hard bottom, including rock and gravel; aphotic soft bottom; euphotic soft bottom; shell sands; salt marsh; and algal wracks.

13 STATE OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE RAET NATIONAL MARINE PARK (SOUTHERN NORWAY)