| Summary: | The last two decades have witnessed a complete shift in our perception of the deep sea, from a homogeneous, mostly muddy and unspoiled seafloor to a vast patchwork of diverse and fragile habitats as well as a reservoir of living resources, both energy and mineral. Growing and concomitant awareness of the potential for blue growth and vulnerability of deep-sea ecosystems triggered the implementation of management measures and Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) at national, regional and international levels, which are now cumulating in the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and the International Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ). Based on the best available knowledge collated and produced in the framework of ATLAS, the objective of the present deliverable was to integrate all available data into a common analytical framework for systematic conservation planning at the scale of the North Atlantic. Regional-scale MSP in the deep sea unfortunately suffers from a lack of knowledge on the distribution of species and habitats. Such large-scale endeavours to date have thus been mainly relying on biogeochemical and physiographic proxies to design networks of marine protected areas. In just three years, ATLAS has taken an unprecedented step forward in synthesising the data available for the North Atlantic on the distribution of the most vulnerable deep-sea habitats where fragile and long-lived engineering species, such as corals and sponges, are aggregating. Such a synthesis has been enabled through trans-Atlantic collaboration. The 13 case studies (CS), evenly distributed from north to south and east to west of the northern Atlantic, provided new discoveries of deep-sea vulnerable habitats off Greenland, in the Alboran Sea and the Gulf of Cádiz, as well as on Formigas and Tropic seamounts. Beyond new discoveries, ATLAS CS confirmed and improved knowledge on the distribution, ecology and functionality of those vulnerable habitats in the North Atlantic. For Case ...
|
|---|