An international effort is underway to establish a representative system of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Southern Ocean to help provide for the long-term conservation of marine biodiversity in the region. Important to this undertaking is knowledge of the distribution of benthic assemblages. Here, our aim is to identify the areas where benthic marine assemblages are likely to differ from each other in the Southern Ocean including near-shore Antarctica. We achieve this by using a hierarchical spatial classification of ecoregions, bathomes and environmental types. Ecoregions are defined according to available data on biogeographic patterns and environmental drivers on dispersal. Bathomes are identified according to depth strata defined by species distributions. Environmental types are uniquely classified according to the geomorphic features found within the bathomes in each ecoregion. We identified 23 ecoregions and nine bathomes. From a set of 28 types of geomorphic features of the seabed, 562 unique environmental types were classified for the Southern Ocean. We applied the environmental types as surrogates of different assemblages of biodiversity to assess the representativeness of existing MPAs. We found that 12 ecoregions are not represented in MPAs and that no ecoregion has their full range of environmental types represented in MPAs. Current MPA planning processes, if implemented, will substantially increase the representation of environmental types particularly within 8 ecoregions. To meet internationally agreed conservation goals, additional MPAs will be needed. To assist with this process, we identified 107 spatially restricted environmental types, which should be considered for inclusion in future MPAs. Detailed supplementary data including a spatial dataset are provided.
Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War A major contribution to debates about the origins of the Civil War, this study of English forests and hunting from the late sixteenth century to the early 1640s explores their significance in the symbolism and effective power of royalty and the nobility in early modern England. Blending social, cultural, and political history, Daniel Beaver examines the interrelationships among four local communities to explain the violent political conflicts in the forests in the years leading up to the Civil War. Adopting a micro-historical approach, the book explores how local politics became bound up with national political and ideological divisions. The author argues that, from the early seventeenth century, a politics of land use in forests and other hunting reserves involved its participants in a sophisticated political discourse, touching on the principles of law and justice, the authority of the crown, and the nature of a commonwealth.
This essay concerns the permutations of English popular politics in its seventeenth-century Atlantic setting, using the record of local and individual experience of politics to examine the process whereby settlers took possession of land in Massachusetts Bay. Historians have long appreciated the importance of English local customs in the early North American settlements, but the explicit political significance of English corporate and manorial approaches to land law in these settlements, and in the expansion of the Massachusetts Bay regime during the 1640s, have not been properly understood. The essay's perspective is microhistorical, developing its case from Obadiah Bruen's detailed "town book" of the Gloucester plantation: the book that he kept as the settlement's recorder between 1642 and 1650. The plantation occupied a key set of coordinates at the junction of English popular politics and religion and the building of the Massachusetts Bay colony during the 1640s. Using a close reading of Bruen's text, the essay identifies a politics of land possession, fashioned from traditional English political forms and their uses of land law, that sustained the Gloucester plantation, much like the colony as a whole, through a decade of bitter internal divisions. In the face of religious conflict and the myriad difficulties of building a new regime, political order came to depend, in Gloucester as in Massachusetts Bay generally, on the power to convey secure title to the possession of land, a power enshrined in the routine administrative records of local notaries or recorders, officially required in each Massachusetts Bay township during the 1640s.
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