ProtectedSeas’ complete European MPA data, along with North America, the Caribbean and the High Seas, is freely available on its open Navigator platform.
The ProtectedSeas Navigator, a free interactive map of current marine life protections and their boundaries, recently published regulation summaries, boundaries, allowed human activities, and Level of Fishing protection assessments for over 6,700 marine protected areas (MPAs) across 44 European countries. This represents a major expansion of the database, which includes over 13,000 MPAs in over 80 countries and overseas territories, including the High Seas, North America and the Caribbean.
“We are thrilled to be able to share over six years of intense data collection work with our colleagues in marine conservation to aid in the dissemination and analysis of global marine protected areas. We offer Navigator freely, and encourage wide usage. By making this information widely available online, ProtectedSeas supports improved awareness and compliance with the protection measures of these special places so critical to ocean health. Navigator data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.”
Navigator data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. For details, please contact info@protectedseas.net.
“By our calculation, total European waters are roughly two times larger than the land area of the European Union. While the total number of European MPAs is impressive, less than 0.15 percent of European waters – an area roughly the size of Kosovo – are highly or fully protected from fishing based on ProtectedSeas’ Level of Fishing Protection assessment,” said ProtectedSeas Director Virgil Zetterlind.
For each protected area, Navigator includes a synopsis of key regulations, allowed status of specific fishing and other human activities, and a standardized level of fishing protection score. All information is available in English and in each country’s official language. The ProtectedSeas team anticipates completing global coverage in 2022.
After approximately six years in development, ProtectedSeas is proud to offer this tool as a free, open-source platform to aid marine resource planning. A wide audience, including MPA managers, resource protection staff, policy makers, scientists, and the conservation community, can access ocean conservation regulations and protection metrics at https://map.navigatormap.org/. Through a NOAA public-private partnership, Navigator helps inform the U.S. MPA inventory, which in turn informs the U.S. Protected Areas Database (PADUS) and the upcoming 30×30 America the Beautiful Stewardship Atlas. International Navigator data is also cross referenced to areas in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Database on Protected Areas (IUCN WDPA) for those conducting global assessments.
Many factors impact the effectiveness of MPAs to protect marine life, including size, location, habitat representation, ecological connectivity, and, importantly, the degree to which extractive marine activities are restricted or prohibited. Collating specific information on marine protections at the local, state and global levels is critical to evaluate the effectiveness of current MPAs and inform the planning of new protections. The availability of detailed regulatory information on this scale supports many avenues of conservation analysis including species level targeting, impact of particular human activities, and more broadly various frameworks for overall Level of Protection including the MPA Guide, Regulations Based Classification System (RBCS), and future systems used to assess progress towards national and global targets such as the 30×30 Goal.
ProtectedSeas Director Virgil Zetterlind stated:
“We are thrilled to be able to share over six years of intense data collection work with our colleagues in marine conservation to aid in the dissemination and analysis of global marine protected areas. We offer Navigator freely, and encourage wide usage. By making this information widely available online, ProtectedSeas supports improved awareness and compliance with the protection measures of these special places so critical to ocean health. Navigator data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution license.”
Navigator data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution license. For details, please contact info@protectedseas.net.
