Louisa Wood

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the results of the first explicitly marine-focused, global assessment of protected areas in relation to global marine protection targets, and validate concerns over the relevance and utility of broad conservation targets.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate that PAs currently cover 14.6% of terrestrial and 2.8% of marine extent, but 59-68% of ecoregions, 77-78% of important sites for biodiversity, and 57% of 25,380 species have inadequate coverage.

TL;DR: The EBSA process has reached a critical juncture, whereby a large percentage of the global ocean has been considered by the regional workshops, but the procedure by which these areas can be incorporated into formal management structures has not yet been fully developed as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The results indicate that the GIS-based MCE framework supports the objective identification of priority locations for future marine protection by integrating multi-source spatial data, facilitating the simultaneous combination of multiple objectives, explicitly including stakeholder preferences in the decisions, and providing visualisation capabilities to better understand how global MPA networks might be developed under conditions of uncertainty and complexity.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors look at the coverage of the world's 5045 marine protected areas from a biogeographic perspective and find that only 4.09% of continental shelf areas are incorporated within MPAs, although coverage rises to 12.1% in a narrow coastal belt.