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The distributions of migratory species in the ocean span local, national and international jurisdictions. Across these ecologically interconnected regions, migratory marine species interact with anthropogenic stressors throughout their lives. Migratory connectivity, the geographical linking of individuals and populations throughout their migratory cycles, influences how spatial and temporal dynamics of stressors affect migratory animals and scale up to influence population abundance, distribution and species persistence. Population declines of many migratory marine species have led to calls for connectivity knowledge, especially insights from animal tracking studies, to be more systematically and synthetically incorporated into decision-making. Inclusion of migratory connectivity in the design of conservation and management measures is critical to ensure they are appropriate for the level of risk associated with various degrees of connectivity. Three mechanisms exist to incorporate migratory connectivity into international marine policy which guides conservation implementation: site-selection criteria, network design criteria and policy recommendations. Here, we review the concept of migratory connectivity and its use in international policy, and describe the Migratory Connectivity in the Ocean system, a migratory connectivity evidence-base for the ocean. We propose that without such collaboration focused on migratory connectivity, efforts to effectively conserve these critical species across jurisdictions will have limited effect.

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In 2004, Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) addressed a United Nations (UN) call for area-based planning, including for marine-protected areas that resulted in a global effort to describe ecologically or biologically significant marine areas (EBSAs). We summarized the results, assessed their consistency, and evaluated the process developed by the Secretariat of the CBD to engage countries and experts in 9 regional

Across many scientific domains, the ability to aggregate disparate datasets enables more meaningful global analyses. Within marine biology, the Census of Marine Life served as the catalyst for such a global data aggregation effort. Under the Census framework, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System was established to coordinate an unprecedented aggregation of global marine biogeography data. The OBIS data system now contains 31.3 million observations, freely accessible through a geospatial portal. The challenges of storing, querying, disseminating, and mapping a global data collection of this complexity and magnitude are significant. In the face of declining performance and expanding feature requests, a redevelopment of the OBIS data system was undertaken. Following an Open Source philosophy, the OBIS technology stack was rebuilt using PostgreSQL, PostGIS, GeoServer and OpenLayers. This approach has markedly improved the performance and online user experience while maintaining a standards‐compliant and interoperable framework. Due to the distributed nature of the project and increasing needs for storage, scalability and deployment flexibility, the entire hardware and software stack was built on a Cloud Computing environment. The flexibility of the platform, combined with the power of the application stack, enabled rapid re‐development of the OBIS infrastructure, and ensured complete standards‐compliance.