- Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative

Piers Dunstan, CSIRO - CERF Prediction program

The Global Ocean Biodiversity Initiative (GOBI) is an initiative to identify ecologically and biologically significant areas (EBSA) on the high seas outside national jurisdiction. This will guide development of marine protected areas and other conservation management actions and reports directly through the Convention on Biological Diversity.

GOBI is a collaboration between the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), IUCN, UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Marine Conservation Biology Institute, Census of Marine Life, Ocean Biogeographic Information System and the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab of Duke University, with other partners (including CSIRO and CENSEAM) joining later.

The EBSA criteria are: uniqueness or rarity, special importance for life-history stages of species, importance for threatened, endangered or declining species and/or habitats, vulnerability, fragility, sensitivity, or slow recovery, biological productivity, biological diversity, naturalness. Examples of each of these criteria can be found at the GOBI website. The analyses will be informed by much of the work done by the Global Open Oceans and Deep Seas Biogeographic classification (GOODS) – a bioregionalisation of the pelagic and benthic open oceans. Five working groups are forming:

• Dynamic and pelagic
• Benthic
• Data and products
• Multi-criteria decisions, and
• Pacific regional analysis

The benthic working group is tasked with identifying methods and data relevant to benthic habitats for consideration under the EBSA criteria. The methods developed in the Hub to predict biodiversity patterns around Australia will form an important part of the deliverables of this group. There are 3 primary tasks:

• discuss and consider how EBSA criteria can be applied to benthic communities and ecosystems;
• develop design principles to inform the selection of benthic EBSAs;
• explore and locate benthic data relevant to GOBI in collaboration with the Data working group.

Further information:
Benthic working group - contact the chairperson piers.dunstan@csiro.au
Other working groups of GOBI - contact nic.bax@csiro.au or visit http://www.gobi.org