Linking global biodiversity goals to local conservation efforts: applications for marine spatial planning

Marine environments are at threat globally with degradation effects evident across numerous marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, seagrasses, mangroves and deep-sea floor ecosystems. The main threats to these environments are anthropogenically related, with under 14% of oceans globally being free from direct human impacts. In turn, this degradation has created a net loss of ecosystem area, impacting the ecosystem services that they provide. With the human population growing, and consequently an increased dependence on the ocean, there is a requirement for improved conservation tools for decision makers and practitioners in order to reduce extinction risk to marine species. A species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric uses data on species extinction risks, and associated threats, to assess the impact of abating threats and restoring habitats. Such a tool enables the spatial extents of threats that impact species to be identified and indicates the potential improvement to extinction risk that conservation actions in a particular area can have. However, how the STAR metric can be used in real world applications such as marine spatial planning, and its applicability to conservation action in varying scales, has not yet been assessed. The ability to quantify the contribution of a specified area towards meeting global biodiversity goals is invaluable when considering the limited resources available to practitioners and decision makers. However, global approaches often hold a 'view from everywhere' and therefore utilise data with a coarseness that cannot accurately represent local conditions. When considering the value of marine species in spatial planning, localised data is crucial as the ecological, social and economic value of a species will vary considerably from one area to another. On the other hand, conservation actions on a local level are often disconnected from the wider targets and goals, meaning that actions are not being accounted for. Further to this, as human dependence on marine ecosystems grows, promoting social-ecological resilience when planning conservation actions is becoming increasingly important in the face of climate change. Marine spatial planning is a common conservation tool used to balance human uses of marine environments with ecological protection, however incorporating climate resilience into planning is not widely practiced. Considering the need for restoration to reduce species extinction risk, there is an urgency to determine how social-ecological resilience can be incorporated into spatial planning for threat abatement and restoration efforts under expected environmental change. However, conservation efforts, including restoration, implemented over small scales may have limited impact if they fail to consider the wider environmental landscape, especially when considering anthropogenic stressors such as climate change and fisheries, who's impacts often cannot be spatially constrained.

This project aims to investigate the relationship between local prioritisation processes and global policy goals in marine spatial planning through four research questions: 1) what is the relationship between local prioritisation processes and global policy goals? 2) how can ecosystem restoration efforts contribute to global biodiversity targets? 3) how can socio-ecological resilience be incorporated into marine spatial planning for ecosystem management and restoration? 4) how do localised management efforts contribute to the bigger conservation picture? The ability to determine how scale impacts conservation priorities will help to link global goals and targets with localised actions.