Adapting to heatwave-induced seagrass loss: Prioritizing management areas through environmental sensitivity mapping.

Seagrass meadows support complex species assemblages and provide ecosystem services with a multitude of socio-economic benefits. However, they are sensitive to anthropogenic pressures such as coastal development, agricultural run-off, and overfishing. The increasing prevalence of marine heatwaves (MHWs) due to climate change poses an additional and growing threat. In this study, we apply the environmental sensitivity mapping approach MESA (Mapping Environmentally Sensitive Assets) to explore the potential consequences of MHWs on the ecosystem services that Posidonia oceanica provides to coastal communities. Under the intermediate climate change scenario Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5, Mediterranean marine heatwaves will be severe by 2050, and will very likely increase mortality of P. oceanica. However, the societal risk of seagrass loss is not evenly distributed across the Mediterranean. The spatial distribution of socio-economic implications of seagrass loss is highlighted through two case studies on seagrass-dependent fisheries and coastal hazards. Coastal communities in Tunisia and Libya show very high sensitivity to a loss of fisheries due to a combination of increasingly intense and frequent MHWs, coupled with high proportions of regional seagrass-dependent fisheries catch. The coastlines of Italy, Tunisia, and Cyprus are shown to potentially be highly sensitive to loss of seagrass due to high levels of coastal hazards, and seagrass meadows susceptible to MHW-induced degradation. These coastlines are likely to suffer from reduced coastal protection services provided by intact seagrass meadows. We demonstrate the implications of MHWs for ecosystem service provision to coastal communities in the Mediterranean and the need for policy instruments to help mitigate and adapt to its effect. We also highlight the potential for environmental sensitivity mapping to help support policymakers with rapid screening tools to prioritize resources more effectively to areas where in-depth local planning is needed.

Habitat Protection Indexes - new monitoring measures for the conservation of coastal and marine habitats.

A worldwide call to implement habitat protection aims to halt biodiversity loss. We constructed an open-source, standardized, and reproducible workflow that calculates two indexes to monitor the extent of coastal and marine habitats within protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures. The Local Proportion of Habitats Protected Index (LPHPI) pinpoints the jurisdictions with the greatest opportunity to expand their protected or conserved areas, while the Global Proportion of Habitats Protected Index (GPHPI) showcases which jurisdictions contribute the most area to the protection of these habitats globally. We also evaluated which jurisdictions have the highest opportunity to contribute globally to protecting habitats by meeting a target of 30% coverage. We found that Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) have the greatest potential to do so. Our workflow can also be easily extended to terrestrial and freshwater habitats. These indexes are helpful to monitor aspects of the Sustainable Development Goal 14 and the emerging post-2020 global biodiversity framework, to understand the current status of international cooperation on coastal and marine habitats conservation.