New findings from the Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) highlight how 25 years of annual monitoring, backed by the long-running MarClim project are providing unprecedented insight into the impacts of climate change on the UK’s coastal and intertidal habitats.

Long-term observations of rocky shore species are revealing clear, biological responses to a warming marine climate. Warm-water species are expanding their leading range limits to higher latitudes around the UK coastline, whilst the population abundances of cold-water species are declining in parts of their historic range, and retractions of the trailing range limits being recorded for some species in southwest England.

At the heart of this evidence is the Marine Biodiversity & Climate Change Project (MarClim) programme, one of the UK’s longest-running marine climate change monitoring initiatives. Although continuous annual surveys have been conducted at 100 sites around the UK since 2002, the dataset stretches back to the 1950s, providing an exceptionally rare record of ecological change over more than eight decades.