Challenges for a comprehensive and standardized MPA mapping

Accurate, standardized data on marine managed areas is critical to assess the expected impact of existing MPAs and inform the creation of new areas and management plans. The ProtectedSeas marine managed area project collects... [ view full abstract ]

Accurate, standardized data on marine managed areas is critical to assess the expected impact of existing MPAs and inform the creation of new areas and management plans. The ProtectedSeas marine managed area project collects MPA data and supplements it with detailed information for each MPA. Our maps provides detailed, easily digestible, and up-to-date information on the actual activity restrictions that apply within each MPA. We are committed to completing a global MPA database.

To generate the data, our team scours local and national laws to find all documented MPAs and marine managed areas, verifies that the spatial boundaries are current and correct, and contacts authorities to verify these data. To make our maps comprehensive, detailed, comparable and accessible, our project and prior MPA mapping efforts face the following challenges:

• Lack of completeness of existing national databases.
• Data currency and boundary mismatch, where different data sources display contradicting boundaries of the same MPA.
• Jurisdictional overlaps, where in any given place, multiple, overlapping jurisdictions may hold simultaneously.
• Ambiguous boundary descriptions which use landmarks to define a boundary without specifying numeric latitudes and longitudes.
• Coastline mapping, done through surveys using different methods, results in more than one ‘coastline’ available for any given area. Simplifying a large scale high resolution coastline for display purposes is another source for mismatch.
• Data sourcing, where MPA data is often spread across different management authorities at different levels of government.