This is a report to Natural England (NE) about the biological records for maerl held in the Seasearch database. The overarching intention is to explore distributions and spatial variability in composition of maerl biotopes.
Specific objectives included comparison of diversities and compositions of assemblages of benthic taxa in:
1) named maerl biotopes at Levels 4 and 5 in the JNCC marine habitat classification (MHC; Connor et al., 2004) from different areas of Britain and Ireland, and
2) named maerl biotopes against other biotopes that contain maerl (Level 4 only) from England.