Improving spatial prioritisation for remote marine regions: optimising biodiversity conservation and sustainable development trade-offs.

ABSTRACT: Creating large conservation zones in remote areas, with less intense stakeholder overlap and limited environmental information, requires periodic review to ensure zonation mitigates primary threats and fill gaps in representation, while achieving conservation targets. Follow-up reviews can utilise improved methods and data, potentially identifying new planning options yielding a desirable balance between stakeholder interests. This research explored a marine zoning system in north-west Australia-a biodiverse area with poorly documented biota. Although remote, it is economically significant (i.e. petroleum extraction and fishing). Stakeholder engagement was used to source the best available biodiversity and socio-economic data and advanced spatial analyses produced 765 high resolution data

SUBMITTER: Moore CH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4996080 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature