Like most ocean regions today, the European and contiguous seas experience cumulative impacts from local human activities and global pressures. They are largely in poor environmental condition with deteriorating trends. Despite several success stories, European policies for marine conservation fall short of being effective. Acknowledging the challenges for marine conservation, a 4-year multinational network, MarCons, supported collaborative marine conservation efforts to bridge the gap between science, management and policy, aiming to contribute in reversing present negative trends. By consolidating a large network of more than 100 scientists from 26 countries, and conducting a series of workshops over 4 years (2016-2020), MarCons analyzed challenges, opportunities and obstacles for advancing marine conservation in the European and contiguous seas. Here, we synthesize the major issues that emerged from this analysis and make 12 key recommendations for policy makers, marine managers, and researchers. To increase the effectiveness of marine conservation planning, we recommend (1) designing coherent networks of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the framework of marine spatial planning (MSP) and applying systematic conservation planning principles, including re-evaluation of existing management zones, (2) designing MPA networks within a broader transboundary planning framework, and (3) implementing integrated land-freshwater-sea approaches. To address inadequate or poorly informed management, we recommend (4) developing and implementing

Geopolitics and Marine Conservation transboundary conservation tool, such as the simple conservation caveats found in the Barcelona Convention and Antarctic Convention, which allow for the establishment of intergovernmental cooperation without prejudicing any outstanding jurisdictional issue, would provide a framework for the development of individual transboundary MPAs.

Assessment of cultural ecosystem services (CES), the non‐material benefits provided to humans by nature, is a particularly challenging activity within the complex field of ecosystem service (ES) evaluation. Assessing CES of drylands presents an even greater challenge for at least two reasons. First, assessments of dryland ES are few and limited, particularly regarding CES. Second, CES evaluation methods, even qualitative ones, generally fail to provide a deep and holistic understanding of the dynamic relationship between nature experiences, culture and identity. The current study uses a novel methodology to evaluate CES in a dryland ecosystem: walking‐focusing interviews. In these interviews, participants are encouraged to focus on various aspects of their physical, mental and cognitive experiences as they walked in a natural desert landscape. The interview protocol enabled us to capture a wealth of knowledge regarding people’s desert experiences. Findings indicate that geological phenomena and other abiotic elements of desert landscapes rank high among participants’ reported dryland CES, which inspire complex and multi‐level experiences. Other prominent themes that emerged included imagination, relaxation, wind and quiet. As deserts are low in primary productivity and therefore display less conspicuous biological elements, the protocol was found to be particularly effective for addressing both their living and non‐living CES. The methodology of walking‐focusing interviews is shown to be able to extract information pertaining to people’s holistic experience of nature, which suggests that it is a powerful methodology for CES assessments of landscapes in general.

No abstract

No abstract