Key societal goals to halt biodiversity loss and effectively conserve ecosystems are repeatedly articulated in international agreements and targets. Achievement of these goals requires monitoring and enhanced management of important environments—but which? How do we prioritise one seagrass bed over another, or a seagrass bed over a seamount? Societal preferences or, more specifically, the ‘assigned values’ we apply to things so that we can discuss their relative importance or worth1, drive site selection in conservation as much as it does our selection of friends or restaurants. Many studies have attempted to use ‘assigned values’ to prioritise areas based on potential economic value2, productivity3, ecosystem services4, importance for a taxonomic group (e.g., Important Bird & Biodiversity Areas or Important Marine Mammal Areas5,6), or as wilderness7,8. These are a diverse set of approaches, but all share one common feature: they were designed by experts (typically natural sciences experts), a group that tends to be non-representative by nationality, race, gender, and education. While appropriate and useful mechanisms to synthesise scientific knowledge, the approach limits the global acceptability and applicability of the priorities that they articulate—for example, not everyone cares about birds, and most do not understand ecosystem services.
Since 2011, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has been coordinating regional workshops to facilitate the description of ecologically or biologically significant areas (EBSAs) in the global ocean—effectively, to ascribe agreed ecological value to certain marine and coastal areas9. In designing the process to describe EBSAs, the CBD had three distinct advantages over previous efforts to value places in the ocean. First, they had political buy-in: all stages of EBSA description (including the criteria applied) would be subject to review and critique by the 19688 Parties to the Convention. Second, it was defined as ‘a technical exercise’ to describe the biological and ecological components of an area. Consideration of anthropogenic stressors or management measures was outside the scope of the process. This dynamic reduced some of the potential biases from advocates and made it clear that no single sector was being targeted, as EBSAs were not described with a particular management goal in mind. Third, the process was designed to be participatory and to capture the current understanding of the participants. The CBD Secretariat was tasked with running consensus-based, regional workshops to describe areas that might meet the EBSA criteria. These workshops were chaired by regional representatives, and coastal Parties in the ocean basin region, relevant intergovernmental organisations, and nongovernmental observers were invited to attend and contribute. Workshop participants usually attended a short preparatory training event before they themselves described areas of interest (either before or during the workshop) and prepared the justification for each EBSA. Proposed EBSAs were then approved by all participants in a plenary session of the workshop, and finally submitted to the CBD for review and approval at the CBD Subsidiary Body for Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice and the Conference of Parties (see Dunn et al.9 for more information on this process). The EBSA process also benefited from the use of a suite of seven broad biodiversity criteria (Table 1)10. The criteria simplify a complex problem and can be applied with various levels of detail—as the quantity of data increases, the criteria can be used in more sophisticated ways (see, for instance, Dunstan et al.11).
The first iteration of the EBSA process has drawn to a close. Over more than a decade, 15 regional workshops were convened involving >400 participants, covering 75.7% of the ocean, and identifying 338 EBSAs12,13,14. Given the time constraints imposed on the development of the EBSA templates (they had to be completed within the timeframe of each workshop, usually 3–5 days), the sheer volume of information aggregated in the 15 final reports (3625 pages) is monumental. The outputs of the workshop are representative of (and limited to) the knowledge and views of the workshop participants. As such, the locations identified and the information in the EBSA descriptions also represent the availability of comparable region-wide data, and the capacity within each region to aggregate and synthesise local and regional data before the workshops12. Previous studies have also highlighted the reluctance of parts of the scientific community to contribute data to the process12,13. As scientific knowledge and access to data improve, new areas that meet the EBSA criteria will likely be identified, potentially requiring new workshops to formalise their status.
To date, the EBSA process is the only politically sanctioned, global effort to value places in the ocean. This has resulted in significant attention being paid to the output of the workshops and repeated attempts to include EBSAs in spatial planning15,16,17 and the design of monitoring programmes11,18. Studies have most commonly taken the EBSAs as a whole, without regard to size, spatiotemporal dynamism or the habitats and species included in EBSA templates (e.g., Gownaris et al.19; Visalli et al.15). Other studies (e.g., Harris et al.16) focus solely on smaller EBSAs within national jurisdictions, and suggest that ‘very large EBSAs with boundaries that are not linked to finer scale biodiversity features … are less helpful in a MSP context’. This is a reasonable approach to limiting variability within the EBSA dataset, but one quarter of EBSAs (n = 86) are larger than 100,000 km2. To increase the utility and accessibility of the ocean of knowledge generated by this singular intergovernmental process, and to support appropriate application of the dataset, clarity is required around the types of areas described, the biodiversity they hold, and the rationale for their selection. Here, we attempt to (1) better illuminate the ecosystems and species driving EBSA descriptions, (2) identify gaps across workshop and biogeographic boundaries, (3) update classifications that can help determine if and how EBSA information should be used in a particular management context, and (4) understand the degree to which the values ascribed to these places were being protected through enhanced management measures (as called for by the CBD) when they were described. By categorising and synthesising the information contained within the EBSA templates, we seek to provide a holistic answer to the question: What is an EBSA?
