This article examines the historical development of the Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) fishery in North Greenland from 1774-1898. The purpose of the article is to present a starting point, a so-called baseline, for further studies of the extent of the historical fishery. With data from mainly two archival series, the historical catch figures are presented, which has led to the year 1862 as a realistic baseline for the historical fishery of the Greenland shark in North Greenland.
Fishing and sand mining in Cambodia may not appear to have much in common. However, digging deeper reveals important parallels. Both fishing and sand mining support livelihoods and are connected to a limited natural resource. Meanwhile, they are both typified by precarious livelihoods, on the one hand, and overexploitation, on the other. In bringing these two topics together, the paper combines empirical qualitative research from two separate studies conducted by the co-authors in Cambodia, one in coastal fishing villages and another in the sand mining industry along the Mekong River. We argue that the interplay between fishing and sand mining has paradoxical impacts on livelihoods, supporting one group while undermining another. Using a precarity analysis lens, we show how an unconventional, and largely invisible frontier of natural resource exploitation—sand mining—is intertwined with fisheries, and expands our understanding of the relationship between precarious labour, environmental change, and livelihoods.
Continuous inspection and mapping of the seabed allows for monitoring the impact of anthropogenic activities on benthic ecosystems. Compared to traditional manual assessment methods which are impractical at scale, computer vision holds great potential for widespread and long-term monitoring.
We deploy an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in Jammer Bay, a heavily fished area in the Greater North Sea, and capture videos of the seabed for habitat classification. The collected JAMBO dataset is inherently ambiguous: water in the bay is typically turbid which degrades visibility and makes habitats more difficult to identify. To capture the uncertainties involved in manual visual inspection, we employ multiple annotators to classify the same set of images and analyze time spent per annotation, the extent to which annotators agree, and more.
We then evaluate the potential of vision foundation models (DINO, OpenCLIP, BioCLIP) for automating image-based benthic habitat classification. We find that despite ambiguity in the dataset, a well chosen pre-trained feature extractor with linear probing can match the performance of manual annotators when evaluated in known locations. However, generalization across time and place is an important challenge.
Marine space is overall under increasing pressure from human activities and in the way harming the marine ecosystems. Maritime spatial planning is one of the governance elements in the EU Integrated Maritime Policy (2007) that aims to maximize the sustainable use of the seas and oceans. Maritime spatial planning aims to ensure that the increased use of the marine space takes place in a way that is consistent with the sustainable development in the seas and oceans. According to the MSP Directive it is required to follow an ecosystem-based and thus holistic approach. For this to happen, tools are needed, and some tools are available but with various advantages and disadvantages. The aim of the current research has been to develop a comprehensive package of tools to assess the environmental impacts of societal activities under different maritime spatial planning proposals.
Marine space is overall under increasing pressures from human activities. Traditionally, the activities taken place in oceans and seas were related to fisheries and transport of goods and people. Today, offshore energy production – oil, gas, and wind, aquaculture, and sea-based tourism are important contributors to the global economy. This creates competition and conflicts between various uses and requires an overall regulation and planning. Maritime activities generate pressures on the marine ecosystems, and in many areas severe impacts can be observed. Maritime spatial planning is seen as an instrument to manage the seas and oceans in a more sustainable way, but information and tools are needed. The current paper describes a tool to assess the cumulative impacts of maritime activities on the marine ecosystems combined with a tool to assess the conflicts and synergies between these activities.
With growing pressures on marine ecosystems and on marine space, an increasingly needed strategy to optimize the use of marine space is to co-locate synergic marine human uses in close spatial–temporal proximity while separating conflicting marine human uses. The ArcMap toolbox SEANERGY is a new, cross-sectoral spatial decision support tool (DST) that enables maritime spatial planners to consider synergies and conflicts between marine uses to support assessments of co-location options. Cross-sectoral approaches are important to reach more
integrative maritime spatial planning (MSP) processes. As this article demonstrates through a Baltic Sea analysis, SEANERGY presents a crosssectoral use catalog for MSP through enabling the tool users to answer important specific questions to spatially and/or numerically
weight potential synergies/conflicts between marine uses. The article discusses to what degree such a cross-sectoral perspective can support integrative MSP processes. While MSP integrative challenges still exist, SEANERGY enables MSP processes to move towards developing shared goals and initiate discussions built on best available knowledge regarding potential use-use synergies and use-use conflicts for whole sea basins at once.
Spatial tools to calculate cumulative impact assessments on the environment (CIA) are important contributors to the implementation of an ecosystem-based approach to maritime spatial planning (MSP). Ecosystem dynamics are increasingly important to understand as the activities and pressures in marine areas increase. Results from the application of a new training set for the CIA tool MYTILUS, developed in capacity-building MSP projects for active learning environments, illustrate important points on how the CIA method can be used in systematic scenario design. The feedback from its use in an online PhD course outlines how the training set successfully enables researchers from different disciplines and different parts of the world to meet the CIA approach with such interest and understanding that it enables them to highlight the strengths as well as the shortcomings of the tool interface, tool capabilities, and CIA method, even when none of these researchers are CIA experts. These promising results are presented in this paper and advocate for the increasing use of MYTILUS and similar CIA tools in MSP stakeholder sessions where no preliminary CIA expertise can be expected. The key strengths and challenges of training CIA with MYTILUS are discussed to point out focus points for how to make its approaches increasingly fit for participatory and decision-making processes in MSP to utilize its promising abilities for supporting ecosystem-based management.
Life depends on healthy oceans that provide ecosystem services (ES) to humans, including provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural ES (Kovalenko et al., 2023). However, biodiversity, habitats, and the delivery of marine ES and resources are increasingly threatened by growing human activities in the oceans (Worm et al., 2006). Blue-growth activities, such as shipping and energy, eutrophication, and climate change represent major pressures that affect marine ecosystems (Halpern et al., 2008; Ehlers, 2016). Over the past two decades, increasing scientific attention has focused on the need to preserve and restore healthy marine waters and their role in adapting to climate change (Santos et al., 2020). This challenge calls for holistic approaches that advance our knowledge. Within the contributions to this Research Topic (see Figure 1), three themes are central to driving further research to expand our understanding in this interdisciplinary field.
Rapporter fra flere globale miljøinstitutioner, her
-
under den internationale science-policy platform
om biodiversitet og økosystemtjenester (herefter
IPBES), understreger behovet for genopretning af
økosystemer (1,2). Den seneste globale IPBES-rap
-
port fra maj 2019 peger således på, at forringelser
af økosystemer på land og i havet underminerer
livsgrundlaget for 3,2 milliarder mennesker. Gen
-
opretning bliver fremhævet som en af de vigtig
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ste handlemuligheder for effektivt at begrænse
tabet af biodiversitet og forbedre livsgrundlaget
for os mennesker ved at imødegå forringelser for
en række økosystemtjenester. Det nuværende årti
2021-2030 er af UNEP udpeget til årtiet for genop
-
retning med det formål at genetablere ødelagte
eller forarmede økosystemer verden over.
IPBES rapporterne dokumenterer, at biodiversi
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tetskrisen er en altomfattende og global udfor
-
dring, og at krisen er på linje med klimakrisen. De
tiltagende klimaændringer er ligeledes en af ho
-
vedårsagerne til tab af biodiversitet (2). Der er af
hensyn til begge kriser behov for, at der beskyttes
og genetableres velfungerende og uforstyrrede
økosystemer. Der bør derfor ske en national ud
-
møntning af resultaterne fra de internationale aftaler baseret på den bedst tilgængelige viden.
We approach questions of Arctic marine resource economic development from the framework of environmental and resource economics. Shipping, fishing, oil and gas exploration and tourism are discussed as evolving industries for the Arctic. These industries are associated with a number of potential market failures which sustainable Arctic economic development must address. The varying scales of economic activity in the region range from subsistence hunting and fishing to actions by wealthy multinational firms. The ways in which interactions of such varied scales proceed will determine the economic futures of Arctic communities and the natural resources and ecosystems upon which they are based.