1. BlueBRIDGE: supporting maritime spatial planning through provision of data and analysis
Miles Macmillan-Lawler
GRID-Arendal
Partners: FAO, GRID-Arendal, CLS, Engineering

2. Maritime Spatial Planning
The context
Maritime Spatial Planning
Competition for maritime space – for renewable energy equipment, aquaculture and other growth areas – has highlighted the need for efficient management, to avoid potential conflict and create synergies between different activities
EU Maritime Spatial Planning
By 2020 […] 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services, are protected […]
CBD Aichi target 11
BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium

3. BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium
The challenges
Maritime spatial planning requires information on the location of activities and how these relate to the environment and management measures to inform decision making
Key challenges include:
Incomplete or non-existent information on the location of human uses (e.g. aquaculture facilities)
Information on human uses, management and environment not easily accessible (in one place)
Time consuming to collate and analyse the relationships between human uses, management and environment
BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium

4. BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium
The challenges
Two key challenges being addressed by the BlueBRIDGE project Develop rapid inventories of Aquaculture facilities Develop tools to assess features in marine managed areas (e.g. MPAs)
BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium

5. The BlueBRIDGE solutions: Aquaculture
Where are all the aquaculture cages in Greece? Earth observation imagery to derive aquaculture cage locations
BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium

6. The BlueBRIDGE solutions: Aquaculture
Where are all the aquaculture cages in Greece?
431 farms in FAO database (309 excluding hatchery and non-cage farms)
253 assessed by tool
8699 fish cages for a total of m²
56 ‘missing farms’:
22 due to image availability (no high resolution available image from Bing WMS)
Some with clouds
Some due to merging
BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium

7. The BlueBRIDGE solutions: Protected Areas
What is protected in the Bahamas protected area network? Marine protected areas (Protected Planet) Exclusive economic zones (Marine Regions), Ecoregions (MEOW/PPOW) Seagrass, mangroves and coral reefs (WCMC), seafloor geomorphology (GRIDA)

8. The BlueBRIDGE solutions: Protected Areas
What is protected in the Bahamas protected area network?
4.1 per cent of coral reefs represented in MPAs
Deep sea features such as seamounts and canyons are currently not represented in MPAs
This information can be used to prioritise the location of future MPAs to fully achieve committments under CBD Aichi target 11

9. The BlueBRIDGE benefits
Collation and access to relevant data and metadata
Rapid processing time - seconds and minutes instead of hours and days!
Repeatability and comparability of processing
Standardised reporting tools
Infrastructure can be accessed by external projects (e.g. JRC BIOPAMA Project)
BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium

10. Next steps Aquaculture pond detection Indonesia Mangrove detection
Integrate regional datasets
Europe/Caribbean
User data into protected area algorithm
MPAs / ecological features

11. BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium
Impact
Aquaculture Atlas With little overhead, countries can identify the location of aquaculture facilities to feed into management and MSP Protected Areas Countries can report on their protected area networks to determine how well they are representing a standard range of ecologically relevant features (Aichi target 11)
BlueBRIDGE workshop, 11 January 2017, Brussels, Belgium

12. Thank You
Questions?