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Marine protected areas can serve to regulate harvesting and conserve biodiversity. Within large multi-use MPAs, it is often unclear to what degree critical sites of biodiversity are afforded protection against commercial activities. Addressing this issue is a prerequisite if we are to appropriately assess sites against conservation targets. We evaluated whether the management regime of a large MPA conserved sites (Key Biodiversity Areas, KBAs) supporting the global persistence of top marine predators.

This report provides some of the thoughts or points to consider in setting up MPAs (marine protected areas) and LMMAs (locally managed marine areas) with the local communities in Milne Bay Province

There are not perfect data which describe the distribution and abundance of every marine habitat and species in the Pacific. And certainly not at a scale that is useful for national planning in the ocean. Bioregionalisation, or the classification of the marine environment into spatial units that host similar biota, can serve to provide spatially explicit surrogates of biodiversity for marine conservation and management. Existing marine bioregionalisations however, are at a scale that is too broad for national governments in the Pacific to use.

Cook Islands Protected Areas (PA) data from the World Database (WDPA). This dataset includes both tables and spatial data.

To safeguard biodiversity effectively, marine protected areas (MPAs) should be sited using the best available science. There are numerous ongoing United Nations and nongovernmental initiatives to map globally important marine areas. The criteria used by these initiatives vary, resulting in contradictions in the areas identified as important. Our analysis is the first to overlay these initiatives, quantify consensus, and conduct gap analyses at the global scale.

For more than 40 years, marine zoning has played a key role while evolving as part of the adaptive management of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) Marine Park.

Converting assemblages of marine protected areas (MPAs) into functional MPA networks requires political will, multidisciplinary information, coordinated action and time. We developed a new framework to assist planning environmental representativity in a network across the marine space of Portugal, responding to a political commitment to protect 14% of its area by 2020. An aggregate conservation value was estimated for each of the 27 habitats identified, from intertidal waters to the deep sea.