Ocean Data Viewer

Decision
UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems
Datasets Covered

Summary
In response to the 27th session of the FAO Committee on Fisheries (COFI) and through the Resolution 61/105 of the United Nations General Assembly on sustainable fisheries adopted in 2006, the FAO has begun work to address the establishment of standards and the development of International Guidelines. The technical guidelines include “standards for management and criteria for identifying vulnerable marine ecosystems beyond areas under national jurisdiction and the impacts of fishing activities on such ecosystems, in order to facilitate the adoption and the implementation of conservation and management measures by RFMOs and flag States” as requested by COFI.

Established
In August 2008, the International Guidelines for the Management of Deep-sea Fisheries in the High Seas developed through FAO, were adopted by FAO Members at a Technical Consultation in Rome.

Key Points
These guidelines provide countries and regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) with a voluntary tool through which to better manage fisheries for sustainable use and to protect vulnerable marine ecosystems.

Links
Guidelines (June 2009)

Tools in partnership with UNEP-WCMC

Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool
IBAT for business is an innovative tool designed to facilitate access to accurate and up-to-date biodiversity information to support critical business decisions. The tool is the result of a ground-breaking conservation partnership among BirdLife International, Conservation International, International Union for Conservation of Nature and UNEP-WCMC.

2010 Biodiversity Indicators Partnership (2010 BIP)
The 2010 BIP, hosted by UNEP-WCMC, is a global initiative to track progress towards achieving the CBD’s “2010 biodiversity target” to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. The Partnership brings together many international organizations working on indicators, to provide the best available information on biodiversity trends.
GRAME Database
In support of a proposed UN Regular Process for the Global Reporting and Assessment of the Marine Environment, including Socio-Economic Aspects, this is a searchable database of over 1000 relevant assessments, scientific research studies and data holdings at a range of scales.

Coral Reef Watch
The Coral Reef Watch mission is to utilize remote sensing and in situ tools for near-real-time and long term monitoring, modeling and reporting of physical environmental conditions of coral reef ecosystems.
Coral Disease Database
The first version of the GCDD was launched in 2000 and was populated with some 2000 points of data from 155 references, mostly peer reviewed scientific literature. more.

Global Island Database
The Global Island Database aims to enhance the participation and role of islands in international decision-making through identifying and bringing together existing sources of data and information relevant to island systems, and presenting new analyses to aid resource managers and decision-making.
Habitat Validation Tool
This tool allows basic editing and validation of coastal habitat data and is being tested with the Global Distribution of Coral Reefs (2010) and the African subset of the USGS Global Distribution of Mangrove (2000) dataset. This tool will ultimately improve the accuracy of coastal habitat datasets supporting better decision-making. It forms part of our work under the Better Data, Better Decisions Initiative.

Protected Planet
This new interactive website provides data from the World Database on Protected Areas, a partnership between UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, and presents it in combination with other data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Wikipedia, Flickr, and Panoramio. It also provides statistics about protected areas by country.