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Threats facing saline lagoons and their species

Low-lying coastal lagoons in eastern and southern England are vulnerable. They are being lost to the sea, artificially in-filled (38 English lagoons were lost in the latter half of the 1980s), they are shrinking, or just declining in quality - losing their value for the dependent species.

Yet, because of their importance to wildlife, it is essential that saline lagoons are conserved and enhanced. The UK government has produced the BAP for Saline Lagoons to set objectives to address the threats that face the habitat and its species. The plans goals are to maintain and enhance the current number, area and distribution of saline lagoons, and by 2010 to have created sufficient lagoon habitat to offset the losses that have occurred over last 50 years.

Saline lagoons are most threatened by:

• destruction by coastal erosion, breaches in sea-walls, and in future from the impact of sea-level rise
• loss through infilling and land claim for industrial or tourist development
• pollution, especially through nutrient enrichment, which kills the specialist species
• natural degradation, through a lack of management, including gradually infilling with sediment and encroachment by vegetation
• changes in water and salinity levels.

Rare nesting birds using these lagoons are threatened by the loss of suitable nesting areas and by reductions in the quality of feeding habitat that are caused by changes in salinity levels that reduce the abundance of food and from predation and human disturbance.

EU Life-Nature Saline Lagoons Project

• Background to saline lagoons
• Blacktoft Sands
• Havergate Island
• Key actions to enhance saline lagoons
• Langstone oysterbeds
• Lymington - Keyhaven Nature Reserve
• Minsmere
• Old Hall Marshes
• Raising public awareness
• Reads Island
• Routine management work
• Snettisham
• Survey and monitoring
• Tetney - Humberstone Fitties Lagoon
• Threats facing saline lagoons and their species
• Titchwell Marsh