Understanding biodiversity features in marine protected areas

Editor's Notes

• #2: Web application, released in October 2017, after two years of hard work to get it at this stage. The goal of this presentation is to raise awareness of what we have built. The web application is designed to understand ecological important seafloor features such as seamounts, seagrass, canyons and how they are represented in protected area important networks around the world. I work at GRID-Arendal in Norway with two colleagues (Miles Macmillan-Lawler and Debhasish Bhakta) on this project. But we have also worked with other partners (FAO, CNR, CLS and Engineering) to name the main ones.
• #3: We know that there are many uses of the marine environment. There is a competition for this maritime space from a range of sectors, especially some emerging ones such as wind farming and aquaculture. Because of this competition for these spaces there is a need for efficient management, also to avoid competition between these sectors and the environment.
• #4: Within the environment realm we have a lot of different commitments. One of the main ones is the Convention on Biological Diversity and one of its targets is Aichi Target 11 in which countries have committed by 2020 to protect 10% of their coastal and marine areas, especially areas important for biodiversity and ecosystem services. This is what the tools we have developed under BlueBRIDGE is addressing. Currently when countries report on their marine protected areas they mostly report on area, but now we have developed a tool which also allows to report on features protected by marine protected areas.
• #6: So, what are marine protected areas? This is one of the focus of work. Essentially they are a management tool, which helps manage human activities in the maritime environment. They are spatial areas which are set aside and have different restrictions on what activities can and cannot take place in them. Their primary objective is to help maintain key ecosystem services in a region.
• #7: The big driver for this work was work my colleagues did on mapping global seafloor geomorphology. These are essentially different features that vary in depth, shape and size. These include elements such as sea mountains, submarine canyons, ridges, plateaus, the deep ocean trenches, etc. Also coastal features such as the continental shelf, coral reefs.
• #8: And so through this we developed a global comprehensive seafloor geomorphology map showing where all these different features occur. If we combine this with where protected areas occur we can start looking at which features are well protected and which features are less.
• #9: Our web interface also takes into account other important habitats such as seagrass, mangroves and coral reefs. There are some global layers which have been collated by different organizations and are available for these habitats. We have taken these and use them in our virtual research environment (VRE) to facilitate analysis on these as well.
• #10: This is just another global map which shows the coverage of these different layers. You can see a lot of the coral reefs are in the tropical areas, seagrass and mangroves moving into the temperate regions as well. So once again, we can use this data to assess how much of this is protected in marine protected areas.
• #11: Our virtual research environment also allows for analyses using European maritime data – more specifically the standardized map of broad scale seabed habitat types which is available through the EMODnet project.