Remote seamounts are key conservation priorities for pelagic wildlife

Our paper published in Conservation Letters, led by Marine Futures Lab’s National Geographic Pristine Seas Research Fellow Dr Chris Thompson, highlights the value of remote seamounts as key conservation priorities to deliver benefits for threatened pelagic wildlife.

Well-designed and well-managed highly protected MPAs demonstrably halt and reverse declines in ocean wildlife, increase fisheries yields in adjacent waters, and enhance resilience to climate change. Despite being the largest habitable space on the planet, the pelagic ocean is chronically under-explored, making prioritising conservation efforts difficult. With recent commitments to protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030 and the progression of an international treaty to protect biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction identifying key areas to maximise the benefits of protection is critical.

Pelagic species associate strongly with bathymetric features such as seamounts, undersea canyons, and oceanic islands. Both physical and biological drivers make these features important locations for foraging, reproduction, navigation, and other essential functions of pelagic wildlife. Seamounts are particularly important to large pelagic animals and often hold relatively high densities of threatened and commercially important species such as sharks, tunas, and billfishes. There are an estimated 37,889 seamounts in the global ocean, yet less than 4% have been surveyed and less than 6% are located in fully and highly protected MPAs.

Seamounts in remote regions of the ocean that remain less impacted by humans are refuges for mobile and heavily targeted species. These regions harbor wildlife assemblages with higher diversity, greater abundance, larger size, and increased biomass, and can yield valuable insights into ecological processes. Remote regions offer a glimpse of what the ocean was like prior to large-scale anthropogenic impact, and a source from which the rest of the ocean can be regenerated. Remote seamounts are prime targets to deliver on biodiversity conservation commitments.