Page 9 - ebsaws-2014-03

Page 8

Fig. 2-2. Proposals for areas to be considered for the establishment of marine reserves in the
Mediterranean Sea by Greenpeace (2004). For locations corresponding to the numbers in the map

please refer to the original report.

Greenpeace’s (2004) proposal for the consideration of marine reserve establishment includes: the
Alborán Sea, a number of seamounts in the Western Mediterranean, the waters surrounding the
Balearic Islands, the Gulf of Lion, the Algerian stretch, the Carthaginian stretch, the Ligurian Sea,
the Central Tyrrhenian Sea, the Strait of Messina, the Sicily Strait, the Maltese slope, the Medina
Ridge, the Gulf of Sirte (=Sidra), the Libyan head, the Upper Adriatic, the Pomo/Jabuca Trench,
the Otranto Channel, the Hellenic Trench, the Olimpi mud field, the Saronikos Gulf, the Northern
Sporades Islands, the Thracian Sea, the Limnos-Gökçeada area in the north-eastern Aegean, a
stretch between Crete and Turkey, the Central Levantine Sea, the Anaximander Mountains, the
Cyprus Channel, the Eratosthenes Seamount, the Phoenician coast, and the Nile fan.
UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge (UK) keeps a database on known
seamount locations, and these and other bathymetric data should be considered to select High
Seas SPAMI sites. Currently, efforts are ongoing to promote the case for the establishment of
large international High Seas protected areas in the Alborán Sea (Ricardo Sagarminaga, pers.
comm.) and in the Strait of Sicily1.
An older attempt to draw attention to areas of the Mediterranean worthy of consideration for
protection is represented by a gap analysis conducted over the whole region through the
implementation of a GIS approach (Franzosini et al. 2001), which however concentrated efforts
within a depth range of 0-250 m, thus excluding the High Seas from most of the analysis.
Nonetheless, Franzosini et al.’s effort highlighted the need for resorting to proxies for biodiversity
measures in large portions of the Mediterranean, because taxonomic and geographic gaps in
protection still remain, in part due to the lack of systematic surveys. For this reason, we suggest
the adoption of standard criteria used by many institutions and organizations for marine site
selection (see Section 3 in this document).

1 http://www.wwf.it/client/ricerca.aspx?root=13872&parent=11621&content=1