PELAGIC | Prioritizing ecologically significant and globally important marine conservation areas for vertebrates
This document presents the main results of the FRB-Cesab Pelagic project “Prioritizing ecologically significant and globally important marine conservation areas for vertebrates: synthesizing the best available knowledge to inform management and policy“.
Declines in marine predators intensified globally in the 1950’s, as industrial fleets targeted previously inaccessible populations of sharks, tunas, and billfishes. These spatially extensive fisheries continue to expand, while global catches continue to decline. Given the difficulty of managing these fisheries sustainably, large no-take Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been proposed for halting and reversing these declines. These MPAs require knowledge of the critical habitats that maintain these predators and that are relatively immune from the effects of human disturbances. This crucial knowledge is currently severely limited since based primarily on species geographic distributions obtained through fishery catches that remain biased with untargeted species, unfished areas and deliberate underreporting.
Here, the FRB-CESAB PELAGIC project overcame this limitation by collecting the most up-to-date and complete information on the biogeography and habitat use of marine mammals, sharks and fishes.
This document summarizes in a few pages the group’s context and objectives, the methods and approaches used, the main findings, as well as the impact for science, society, and both public and private decision-making.
