Ben Harris

The MPA has been campaigning for some time and that's been driven mainly by a community group called the Community of Arran Seabed Trust.

So a nice, neat acronym COAST.

Yeah, and they've been kind of instrumental in having the MPA set up and monitoring and managing it since its implementation in 2014.

2014.

So on the very inside of the MPA, adjacent to the coast, it's essentially no fishing at all.

There's some small patches of lobster pots which are allowed.

There's a small section by a little area called Holy Isle, which is actually a no-take zone.

It's basically the most extreme form of protection you can have.

And then moving slightly further out, trawling is still permitted, but you are not allowed to dredge.

So for things like scallops and things like that, that's banned.

So it's a slightly different type of impacts in the seabed.

And then outside of that, it's basically fair game, dredging, trawling, whatever you like.

So there's a bit of a gradient

kind of moving away from the coast of very, very high protection to no protection at all.

And that's part of the reason why we're interested to sort of study that gradient, see changes in biodiversity and organic carbon storage along that gradient.

So what did you find then?

So after some scientific wizardry by clever statisticians, we basically found that as you move outwards away from the MPA, we find much less animals in the seabed.

Those animals are important for storing that carbon and a significantly more amount of animals and a greater diversity of animals living in the sediment.

And as I said before, that's important because those animals have a big role to play in turning over that carbon, burying it deeper into the sediment and storing it for long periods of time.

Yeah, for sure.