The United Kingdom has a duty to create an ecologically coherent network of marine protected areas by 2012, as promised under several agreements including the OSPAR Convention, World Summit on Sustainable Development, Convention on Biological Diversity, Water Framework Directive and most recently the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). The European MSFD was transposed into UK legislation on 15 July 2010 and requires member states to prepare national strategies to manage their seas to achieve or maintain Good Environmental Status by 2020. In Annex I, 11 qualitative descriptors were set up to determine 'good environmental status'. Amongst others, they require the maintenance of biological diversity (descriptor 1), populations of all commercially exploited fish and shellfish to be within safe biological limits exhibiting a population age and size distribution that is indicative of a healthy stock (descriptor 3) and to ensure that sea-floor integrity is at a level that ensures that the structure and functions of the ecosystems are safeguarded and benthic ecosystems, in particular, are not adversely affected (descriptor 6).