Home

There has been a profound shift in attitudes towards the designation and management of site-based  conservation over the past 25 years, from being a predominantly science-based, top-down and  government-led approach to one that focuses on governance and equity, and is far more variable,  bottom-up and locally led.

Initiatives to protect 30% of Earth by 2030 prompt evaluation of how to efficiently target shortcomings in the global protected area (PA) network. Focusing on amphibians, the most vulnerable vertebrate class, we illustrate the conservation value of microreserves, a term we employ here to refer to reserves of <10 km2. We report that the network continues to under-represent threatened amphibians and that, despite this clear shortcoming in land-based conservation, the creation of PAs protecting amphibians slowed after 2010.

This paper presents the design and development of a coastal fisheries monitoring system that harnesses artificial intelligence technologies. Application of the system across the Pacific region promises to revolutionize coastal fisheries management. The program is built on a centralized, cloud-based monitoring system to automate data extraction and analysis processes. The system leverages YoloV4, OpenCV, and ResNet101 to extract information from images of fish and invertebrates collected as part of in-country monitoring programs overseen by national fisheries authorities.

The “Marine Protected Area Tool Hub” is an educational platform that is practitioner-focused at every level and developed to help you with your personalised challenges.

Carondelet is a remote seamount in the Phoenix Islands of the Republic of Kiribati. Earlier expeditions of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) were not able to survey the seamount due to challenging ocean conditions. In 2015, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Kiribati Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resource Development conducted surveys around the shallow habitats (<30 m) of the seamount to characterize coral reef fish and benthic communities.

The management plan describes the priority strategies for the upland areas of the Lake Lanoto'o National Park that will nest maintain and improve the key conservation values in these areas by reducing the impact of threats including from climate change. 

Full Document (Pdf)

This report was commissioned by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) to raise awareness and understanding of the tools available to evaluate Protected Area Management Effectiveness (PAME); to provide case studies from the region on PAME assessment; and to help inform decision-making when choosing tools and planning assessments.

Community-based approaches to conservation and natural resource management are considered essential to meeting global conservation targets. Despite widespread adoption, there is little understanding about successful and unsuccessful community-based practices because of the challenges of designing robust evaluations to estimate impacts and analyse the underlying mechanisms to impact. Here we present findings from a national scale evaluation of the ‘locally managed marine areas’ network in Fiji, a marine community-based management initiative.

The Aleipata group of offshore islands have been identified as one of eight Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) in Samoa. They are located at the south-eastern end of Upolu Island at 14o3’447.28”S, 171o25’23.84”W (Nu’utele) and 14o4’22.11”S and 171o24’36.17”W (Nu’ulua) offshore. This project updates population estimates and establish baseline data and information on breeding seabirds of the Aleipata offshore islands and investigate the feasibility of future tracking studies of some species.

The CKI OECM Workshop Report consolidates the discussions, outcomes, recommendations and next steps following the Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures Workshop, hosted by the National Environment Service, in partnership with Secretariat of Pacific Regional Environment Program and the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, on the 24th - 25th January 2023 in Rarotonga, Cook Islands.