Towards a scientific community consensus on designating Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems from imagery.

Management of deep-sea fisheries in areas beyond national jurisdiction by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations/Arrangements (RFMO/As) requires identification of areas with Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs). Currently, fisheries data, including trawl and longline bycatch data, are used by many RFMO/As to inform the identification of VMEs. However, the collection of such data creates impacts and there is a need to collect non-invasive data for VME identification and monitoring purposes. Imagery data from scientific surveys satisfies this requirement, but there currently is no established framework for identifying VMEs from images. Thus, the goal of this study was to bring together a large international team to determine current VME assessment protocols and establish preliminary global consensus guidelines for identifying VMEs from images. An initial assessment showed a lack of consistency among RFMO/A regions regarding what is considered a VME indicator taxon, and hence variability in how VMEs might be defined. In certain cases, experts agreed that a VME could be identified from a single image, most often in areas of scleractinian reefs, dense octocoral gardens, multiple VME species' co-occurrence, and chemosynthetic ecosystems. A decision flow chart is presented that gives practical interpretation of the FAO criteria for single images. To further evaluate steps of the flow chart related to density, data were compiled to assess whether scientists perceived similar density thresholds across regions. The range of observed densities and the density values considered to be VMEs varied considerably by taxon, but in many cases, there was a statistical difference in what experts considered to be a VME compared to images not considered a VME. Further work is required to develop an areal extent index, to include a measure of confidence, and to increase our understanding of what levels of density and diversity correspond to key ecosystem functions for VME indicator taxa. Based on our results, the following recommendations are made: 1. There is a need to establish a global consensus on which taxa are VME indicators. 2. RFMO/As should consider adopting guidelines that use imagery surveys as an alternative (or complement) to using bycatch and trawl surveys for designating VMEs. 3. Imagery surveys should also be included in Impact Assessments. And 4. All industries that impact the seafloor, not just fisheries, should use imagery surveys to detect and identify VMEs.

Filling the data gaps: Transferring models from data-rich to data-poor deep-sea areas to support spatial management.

Spatial management of the deep sea is challenging due to limited available data on the distribution of species and habitats to support decision making. In the well-studied North Atlantic, predictive models of species distribution and habitat suitability have been used to fill data gaps and support sustainable management. In the South Atlantic and other poorly studied regions, this is not possible due to a massive lack of data. In this study, we investigated whether models constructed in data-rich areas can be used to inform data-poor regions (with otherwise similar environmental conditions). We used a novel model transfer approach to identify to what extent a habitat suitability model for Desmophyllum pertusum reef, built in a data-rich basin (North Atlantic), could be transferred usefully to a data-poor basin (South Atlantic). The transferred model was built using the Maximum Entropy algorithm and constructed with 227 presence and 3064 pseudo-absence points, and 200 m resolution environmental grids. Performance in the transferred region was validated using an independent dataset of D. pertusum presences and absences, with assessments made using both threshold-dependent and -independent metrics. We found that a model for D. pertusum reef fitted to North Atlantic data transferred reasonably well to the South Atlantic basin, with an area under the curve of 0.70. Suitable habitat for D. pertusum reef was predicted on 20 of the assessed 27 features including seamounts. Nationally managed Marine Protected Areas provide significant protection for D. pertusum reef habitat in the region, affording full protection from bottom trawling to 14 of the 20 suitable features. In areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ), we found four seamounts that provided suitable habitat for D. pertusum reef to be at least partially protected from bottom trawling, whilst two did not fall within fisheries closures. There are factors to consider when developing models for transfer including data resolution and predictor type. Nevertheless, the promising results of this application demonstrate that model transfer approaches stand to provide significant contributions to spatial planning processes through provision of new, best available data. This is particularly true for ABNJ and areas that have previously undergone little scientific exploration such as the global south.