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The high seas lie beyond the 200 nautical mile limits that define the extent of national sovereignty by countries of the world. They cover 64% of the area of the oceans, and nearly half the surface of the planet. They are a global commons, under the stewardship of the United Nations Law of the Sea for the benefit of all nations. But human pressures on the high seas are increasing fast, and urgent action is needed to protect them from harm. Recent research shows that industrial fishing has

Coral reef monitoring lias been an on-going activity in Samoa since 1997. In 1998. a pilot Village Level Coral Reef Monitoring Project (VLCRMP) was initiated in collaboration between The Fisheries Division, the Division of Environment & Conservation and the International Ocean Institute – Pacific Islands. The pilot project provided monitoring equipment and assisted in training the trainers that, in nuns trained 46 villagers from six villages selected from around the country ( Mulipola 2001 ).

The shallow coastal zone of Fiji is comprised of three major, interrelated habitat types: marine algae and seagrass: large areas of mangroves; and extensive coral reefs. The marine resources include approximately 1000 coral reefs with representatives of all major reef types (Vuki et al„ 2000). Although marine biodiversity is lower than the 'coral triangle' of Indonesia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea and northeastern Australia. Fiji does support approximately 200 species of coral (Veron. 2000).

The baseline assessment provides a current status report on the coastal marine resources of Niue. It offers recommendations for the management options available to address the concerns of local villagers with respect to deterioration of coastal resources. The lessons learned from the pilot project are expected to have national importance and should provide a guide to the best approach to sustainable fisheries management for all of Niue.
Available online only.
Call Number: 338.372
ISBN/ISSN: 978-982-04-0362-8

The purpose of the IWP in Yap is to "promote sustainable coastal fisheries via a system of marine protected areas established and maintained through a collaboration of traditional resource owners, government and non-government organizations, and other stakeholders in one management framework" (Anon 2002). The use of MP As is being advocated around the world, particularly the developing world, in part because MP As are relatively uncomplicated to implement compared to technically demanding yield-based management measures such as quotas.

A great deal of deep-sea biodiversity is concentrated around features known as seamounts. Seamounts are like underwater islands - mountains that rise 1,000 meters or higher from the seabed but do not break the ocean surface. Although they have not been comprehensively mapped, it is estimated that there may be more than 100,000 seamounts worldwide. Almost half of these are believed to lie in the Pacific Ocean. To date, less than one percent of known seamounts have been comprehensively studied. The largest mountain range on planet Earth is beneath the ocean the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

New Caledonia is surrounded by a large and rich lagoon which is enclosed by a barrier reef over 1,000 km long. Exploitation of the living lagoon resources to meet local requirements for
fish and other seafood has not, up to now, greatly affected the overall bio-ecological balance of the lagoon environment because New Caledonia's population density is very low.
The sea area near the capital of Noumea, where over half of the

Bio-ORACLE is a set of GIS rasters providing geophysical, biotic and environmental data for surface and benthic marine realms. The data are available for global-scale applications at a spatial resolution of 5 arcmin (approximately 9.2 km at the equator).

Linking biodiversity occurrence data to the physical and biotic environment provides a framework to formulate hypotheses about the ecological processes governing spatial and temporal patterns in biodiversity, which can be useful for marine ecosystem management and conservation.

GEBCO's aim is to provide the most authoritative publicly-available bathymetry of the world's oceans. It operates under the joint auspices of the International Hydrographic Organization(IHO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) (of UNESCO).

GEBCO produces and makes available a range of bathymetric data sets and products. This includes a global bathymetric grid; gazetteer of undersea feature names, a Web Map Service and printable maps of ocean bathymetry.

Conservation International, GRID-Arendal and Geoscience Australia recently collaborated to produce a map of the global distribution of seafloor geomorphic features. The global seafloor geomorphic features map represents an important contribution towards the understanding of the distribution of blue habitats. Certain geomorphic feature are known to be good surrogates for biodiversity. For example, seamounts support a different suite of species to abyssal plains.