2. Conservation and protected areas

Human threats – including fishing, climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, and invasive species – are leading to declining abundance of many marine species. To mitigate impacts of these threats on biodiversity, marine protected areas – national parks in the ocean – are being created. As there is a global push to increase the marine protected area network coverage from 8% to potentially 20% or even 30% in the next decade, developing the science to underpin where to place these reserves is critical and timely.

A current focus of our research is thus how to design robust climate-smart marine protected areas that conserve biodiversity, protect against climate change, retain biodiversity as the climate warms, ensure connectivity, minimise conflict with fishing, whilst considering the 3-D nature of the ocean. This is a tough task! It requires extensive computational expertise and infrastructure. Our work involves mapping global biodiversity and developing new approaches to the design of climate-smart marine protected area networks using state-of-the-art statistical and computational approaches on super-computers.