In March, after nearly two decades of debate, UN member states Approved historic treaty to protect marine life on the high seas. Although two-thirds of the world’s oceans are considered high seas, i.e. outside national jurisdiction, only 1% This area is currently protected. Most are unregulated and left vulnerable to overfishing and pollution.

The new UN agreement aims to solve this problem by creating a framework for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in these waters, including the establishment of marine protected areas.

“The treaty is not a complete solution,” said Octavio Aburto, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. “But at least now there is a framework and work can begin to end irresponsible exploitation of the high seas.”

These waters are home to a great diversity of biodiversity and ecosystems, such as deep-sea corals and migratory animals. They also play a key role in regulating the Earth’s climate because marine and marine organisms absorb large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Conserving it is critical to stabilizing the planet’s climate system.

But monitoring and protecting the high seas has inherent difficulties, given its remoteness and size. The lack of environmental information also makes it difficult to identify particularly vulnerable areas and to develop conservation strategies.

It is at this point that artificial intelligence (AI), satellite imagery and other innovative technologies can provide key data to fill information gaps.

Illegal fishing control

Several organizations have used a combination of satellite imagery and machine learning to detect illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing in real time, and presented their results in free to use the online platform.

Global Fisheries Watchfor example, providing a map online interactive system that uses data from vessel transceivers to track their movements and estimate commercial fishing effort. In this way, you can follow the ship through the country’s exclusive economic zone, marine protected areas and the high seas. However, it depends on the ship’s transmission, and sometimes the ship “they darken”, deactivating their tracking device. According to Global Fishing Watch, this was not necessarily intentional, but was a “big alarm bell”.

Another initiative is looking for signs in the sky to help identify unusual behavior in the oceans. Developed by the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), a non-profit organization, Skylight is a monitoring platform that uses satellite imagery to provide fisheries authorities with timely information.

Ted Schmitt, AI2 Director of Conservation and in charge of the Skylight program, said that Agreement on Port State Actions (AMERP) is critical in the fight against fishing crime. It helps countries coordinate to prevent IUU fishing vessels from landing their catches, and is the first binding international treaty to specifically target IUU fishing. port authorities implemented measures under AMERP,” he added.

This technology uses tools such as satellite imagery, “computer vision” and machine learning to analyze data and detect suspicious activity in real time. By definition, the high seas are distant seas, making it impractical to have ships and surveillance patrols.

“You really have to do remote sensing, at the very least, to know where to do monitoring, so… when you send in Coast Guards, planes and drones, chances are there really is something there,” Schmitt said.

As criminals try to get ahead by turning off their tracking systems to avoid detection near protected or restricted areas, developers are forced to work faster and stay ahead.

To support this technology, Skylight offers training to government and NGO representatives. That Joint Analytical Cell(JAC) is a group of organizations, including Global Fishing Watch and Tracking platform Trygg Mat, working to ensure technology reaches the right people and serves its purpose.

Currently, Skylight is primarily focused on monitoring the exclusive economic zone, but as the high seas agreement progresses, the platform will reportedly develop systems to extend its coverage in far-flung waters. The challenge, Schmitt explained to China Dialogue Ocean, is accessing satellite imagery for the high seas, because images are often not freely available and expensive to obtain, areas where JAC can help improve access. .

What is computer vision?

This is an area of ​​artificial intelligence (AI) that helps computers find important information in digital images and videos and then take action or make recommendations. Based on IBM“If AI allows computers to think, computer vision enables them to see, observe, and understand.”

What areas must be protected? Animals with GPS could have the answer

One of the main outcomes of the high seas treaty will help establish marine protected areas in these waters. But how will they be appointed? What should be the priority in protecting parts of the ocean?

On the high seas, in the northeast Atlantic, for example, six protection zones were defined in 2010, under the Northeast Atlantic Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment, commonly referred to as the OSPAR Convention. Since then, four more OSPAR Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been established.

A article published in 2021 in the Journal of Applied Ecology describes how the first six OSPAR buffer zones are defined largely for their benthic features—which are found at the lowest levels near the ocean floor—including fracture zones and ridges. But their authors, like other observers, argue that other marine life forms, such as seabirds, have not been accounted for. Animal tracking data can prove valuable in situations like this.

Marine biologist Guy Harvey is a proponent of this approach. His organization, the Guy Harvey Foundation, uses GPS tracking of marine animals to show possible MPA areas.

In 2018, for example, Harvey tagged a whale shark near Mexico’s Caribbean coast that in 2022 had traveled 19,000 miles: through the Gulf of Mexico into Colombian waters, then north to the Florida coast, off the Atlantic coast, and once through the Caribbean Sea. more before reaching Cuba.

In conference our oceansthat took place in Panama this past March, Harvey explains that this type of mapping can help understand immigration guidelines and species habitats, and suggest sites for new MPAs. When comparing this data with areas that are already protected, discrepancies often occur, explains Harvey.

Elsewhere, there are also initiatives that use data on bird migration patterns to identify important marine areas. BirdLife International, a global association of NGOs, analyzed the routes of 2,000 seabirds from Seabird Tracking Database. Thus, an Important Bird and Biodiversity Area (IBA) was identified, which is now renamed the Evlanov-North Atlantic Ocean Current MPA, or BORN AMP.

Up to 5 million birds use the area year-round, making it an important meeting point for migratory seabirds from around the world. The OSPAR Commission officially designated NACES in 2021, and this is the first MPA to use tracking data to identify them. It is larger in area than England and Germany combined, although it still is was arguing scope of application and management.

Technology challenges

There are other technological tools that can help protect the high seas, such as autonomous submarine who explore the bottom of these waters and non-profit satellite monitoring SkyTruth, which serves to identify oil spills. The latter is the first to provide evidence that BP’s oil spill following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was much larger than originally thought.

“All of these tools have advanced very quickly, but the big challenge now is to see how they feed into decision-making,” said Octavio Aburto. He added that such tools are “still in a very technological and scientific phase,” and that governments often do not have the resources or capacity to train prefectures and their armed forces to participate in monitoring and enforcement efforts on the high seas.

The big challenge now is to see how this technology feeds into decision-making

Barriers to effectively protecting the high seas can arise from the need to balance initiatives with commercial interests, regardless of whether current practices are unsustainable or depleting fish stocks. As the treaty is implemented, it should also become clearer how it will interact, in practice, with other existing agreements, such as those governing shipping under the International Maritime Organization.

The absence of a global governance framework has made a coordinated approach to conservation measures on the high seas impossible. The new agreement opens up the possibility for governments and civil society to submit proposals for the protection of the high seas. The results will be seen in the coming years, when the agreement is implemented.

This article was originally published on China Sea of ​​Dialogue.