A bird's-eye view of monitoring and management of marine and coastal protected areas

Abstract

The continual damage to ecosystem integrity, functions, and processes caused by increasing anthropogenic pressures on a global scale are threatening the supply of ecosystem services fundamental for human well-being. Marine and coastal protected areas (MCPAs) are an essential bastion of ecosystem services. Their special management and conservation status aims to ensure the maintenance of key ecosystem functions and the sustained supply of ecosystem services in the face of increasing pressures. This chapter deals with the contribution of Earth observation (EO) for the enhancement of knowledge-based conservation, management, and restoration policies in MCPAs, to ensure the sustainable provision of ecosystem services. H2020 European Project ECOPOTENTIAL has led to a novel unified framework for improving the monitoring and management of MCPAs, based on the use of EO. The framework constitutes a significant progress beyond the state of the art, due to its unique capacity to blend EO from remote sensing and field measurements. It also maximizes return on investments due to its capabilities for data mining and inclusion of versatile modeling approaches utilizing information from EO. These tools allow for assessing ecosystem service supply in current and future conditions, designing and executing needs assessment of new measurement protocols, and evaluating the requirements of new MCPAs. Open and interoperable access to data and knowledge will be ensured to researchers, managers, policy makers, and stakeholders by a GEO Ecosystem Virtual Laboratory Platform, fully integrated in GEOSS. To show how this unified framework is applied we showcase two MCPAs that include marine areas and coastal wetlands: Wadden Sea and Doñana, with specific focus on their relevance for bird conservation.