Summary: | The CCAMLR MPA Workshop on Marine Protected Areas, held in Brest (France) in August 2011, recommended that the Scientific Committee considers supporting three technical workshops including one specific to Planning Domain 5. Planning Domain 5 includes Marion and Prince Edward Islands, the Del Cano Rise and the Crozet Archipelago in the north. It also includes the Ob and Lena seamounts. The workshop focusing on Planning Domain 5 was held in St Pierre, La Réunion, France from 15th May to 18th May, 2012 at the headquarters of TAAF (French Southern and Antarctic Territories). It followed a meeting on the northern part of Planning Domain 5, which was held in South Africa in 2008, organized and funded by WWF South Africa and known as Del Cano 1. The intention of the CCAMLR workshop was to study the ecological values and the use of the marine environment and to identify possible threats that might occur in this area. It extended the Del Cano 1 study spatially and also ecologically to include the benthic and pelagic realms. Identification of objectives for Conservation Planning and future research were discussed in relation to national and international projects. Depending on the availability of data, the approach was based on mapping species distributions (either observed data or predictions for species or community presence/abundance based on environmental factors). Various national and international datasets were used including data from CCAMLR. However, South African and French data relevant to the Planning Domain 5 and surrounding domains were a major focus in the workshop because these CCAMLR member nations are the major scientific actors in this region. Species distributions were visualized by the mean of a Geographic Information System. Available Norwegian data from the Bouvetøya region were also discussed, but this region is less studied compared to the Planning Domain 5. The workshop provided benthic and pelagic abiotic classifications of the Planning Domain using geographic and oceanographic features. ...
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