Where Marine Protected Areas would best represent 30% of ocean biodiversity

Zhao, Qianshuo; Stephenson, Fabrice; Lundquist, Carolyn J.; Kaschner, Kristin; Jayathilake, Dinusha R.M.; Costello, Mark J.

doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108536

Cited by 71 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 49 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These areas are also in the D1MPA along the West Antarctic Peninsula, Weddell Sea MPA Phase 1 and 2, EAMPA in East Antarctica and the Ross Sea Region MPA in the Ross Sea (Hindell et al, 2020). Furthermore, global mapping initiatives that have either collated multiple evidence streams of where species require protection or management (Gownaris et al, 2019;Zhao et al, 2020), or which have looked at the costbenefit analysis of MPAs (Brander et al, 2020;Klein and Watters, 2020b), also recognize the Antarctic Peninsula, Weddell Sea and East Antarctica as being places that fall outside the bounds of adopted MPAs and that could benefit from protection afforded by well-designed MPAs in the regions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, percentage-based targets alone have several shortcomings that may reduce the effectiveness of sites, especially when poorly managed or inappropriately designed to abate pressures (Watson et al, 2014;Visconti et al, 2019). Therefore, new targets recommend to account for the quality of all sites of global significance for biodiversity, and that these be documented, retained, and restored through protected areas or other effective area-based conservation measures (IPBES, 2019;Visconti et al, 2019;Zhao et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas for Penguins in Antarctica, Targets for Conservation Action

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Global targets for area-based conservation and management must move beyond threshold-based targets alone and must account for the quality of such areas. In the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, a region where key biodiversity faces unprecedented risks from climate change and where there is a growing demand to extract resources, a number of marine areas have been afforded enhanced conservation or management measures through two adopted marine protected areas (MPAs). However, evidence suggests that additional high quality areas could benefit from a proposed network of MPAs. Penguins offer a particular opportunity to identify high quality areas because these birds, as highly visible central-place foragers, are considered indicator species whose populations reflect the state of the surrounding marine environment. We compiled a comprehensive dataset of the location of penguin colonies and their associated abundance estimates in Antarctica. We then estimated the at-sea distribution of birds based on information derived from tracking data and through the application of a modified foraging radius approach with a density decay function to identify some of the most important marine areas for chick-rearing adult penguins throughout waters surrounding Antarctica following the Important Bird and Biodiversity Area (IBA) framework. Additionally, we assessed how marine IBAs overlapped with the currently adopted and proposed network of key management areas (primarily MPAs), and how the krill fishery likely overlapped with marine IBAs over the past five decades. We identified 63 marine IBAs throughout Antarctic waters and found that were the proposed MPAs to be adopted, the permanent conservation of high quality areas for penguin species would increase by between 49 and 100% depending on the species. Furthermore, our data show that, despite a generally contracting range of operation by the krill fishery in Antarctica over the past five decades, a consistently disproportionate amount of krill is being harvested within marine IBAs compared to the total area in which the fishery operates. Our results support the designation of the proposed MPA network and offer additional guidance as to where decision-makers should act before further perturbation occurs in the Antarctic marine ecosystem.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas for Penguins in Antarctica, Targets for Conservation Action

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Where environmental context is needed, we conclude that our seven Ecosystems are the most appropriate for the epipelagic ocean as they are based on an unsupervised cluster analysis of a comprehensive range of surface marine environmental variables. One immediate application has been the layers have been used as one component of biodiversity in designing a global network of Marine Protected Areas (Zhao et al, submitted). This advances previous MPA classifications for the world (Selig et al, ) and Coral Triangle (Asaad, Lundquist, Erdmann, & Costello, ) that lacked ecosystem layers for biodiversity mapping.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping near surface global marine ecosystems through cluster analysis of environmental data

Zhao

Basher

Costello

2019

Ecological Research

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Almost all classifications of the world ocean are based on expert opinion or ad hoc management areas. A quantitative analysis of environmental variables may provide a more objective basis for mapping and classifying the oceans to support data management, reporting, and conservation efforts. Here, we used long‐term averages of 20 ocean variables to classify the ocean surface waters using PCA and k‐means clustering. We identified seven distinct areas that fit the definition of “ecosystems,” that is, enduring regions demarcated by environmental characteristics. Of all the variables, temperature had the greatest importance and correlated with many other variables. However, some variables had uniquely significant effects on the classification, namely slope, surface current, pH, and wave height. Thus, while the present classification is robust for available data, future analyses with variables not presently available may improve it. How the ecosystems correlate with species richness, endemicity, or abundance will inform on the factors that most influence species' abundance, and thus support global modeling of the effects of climate change, for example, with regard to biological carbon fluxes.

show abstract

“…These shortcomings have led to calls for ambitious conservation targets, such as the Half-Earth Project's recommendation that 50% of land and sea be under some form of long-term protection (14), and more recently a 30% protection target by 2030 (15,16) now provisionally included under the Convention on Biological Diversity's post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (17). The spatial conservation planning community has responded by highlighting conservation gaps and opportunity areas for marine species (12,18,19), and by performing spatial optimization to identify biodiversity priorities (15,(19)(20)(21) and multi-objective optimization for food security and carbon sequestration (22).…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Targeted, collaborative biodiversity conservation in the global ocean can benefit fisheries economies

Reygondeau²,

McGowan³

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are key to averting continued loss of species and ecosystem services in our oceans, but concerns around economic trade-offs hamper progress. Here we provide optimized planning scenarios for global MPA networks that secure species habitat while minimizing impacts on fisheries revenues. We found that MPA coverage requirements differ vastly among nations, and that two-thirds of nations benefit economically from a collaborative approach. Immediate global protection of marine biodiversity habitat comes with losses of ~19% of total fisheries revenues, but international cooperation in concert with high seas protection improves economic losses for most countries, safeguards all species, and could save ~5B USD annually worldwide. Nations and fishery economies both share benefits from a coordinated approach to conserving marine biodiversity, with direct relevance to current international policies.

show abstract

Where Marine Protected Areas would best represent 30% of ocean biodiversity

Cited by 71 publications

References 49 publications

Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas for Penguins in Antarctica, Targets for Conservation Action

Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas for Penguins in Antarctica, Targets for Conservation Action

Mapping near surface global marine ecosystems through cluster analysis of environmental data

Targeted, collaborative biodiversity conservation in the global ocean can benefit fisheries economies

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About