MMO Marine Character Areas

asNeeded

The dataset was created by LUC in August 2018 as part of a commission by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) to produce a National Marine Character dataset for all of England's Marine Plan Areas. The coverage of this dataset is based on the extent of all England's Marine Plan Areas as defined in the MMO's 'Marine Plan Areas in England' dataset (available from DATA.GOV.UK). The delineation of the internal Marine Character Area (MCA) boundaries was undertaken as part of a desktop study, creating 63 MCAs using heads-up digitising of natural breaks or clustering of characteristics/features. For specific information on the delineation of each MCA boundary please refer to the MCA profiles within Chapter 3 of the MMO 1134 reports. A full list of datasets used to delineate the MCAs is provided in Annex 1 of the reports, which should be used in conjunction with this dataset. The dataset was created using ESRI's ArcMap 10.4.1 software. The ArcMap Topology toolset was used to quality assure the dataset for topological errors (e.g. overlapping polygons). Caveats an MCA boundaries should be interpreted as transitional zones not hard boundaries (refer to section 2.2 of the reports), the recommended use/display scale is 1:250,000.