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POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article

Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Marine Conservation and Sustainability
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2024.1427099
This article is part of the Research Topic Ocean Sustainability Science and Marine Protected Areas View all articles

High Seas in the Cloud: The Role of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Support of High Seas Governance -The Sargasso Sea Pilot

Provisionally accepted
David Freestone David Freestone 1,2*Kieran N. Bjergstrom Kieran N. Bjergstrom 3Kristina M. Gjerde Kristina M. Gjerde 4Patrick Halpin Patrick Halpin 5Kevin P. Fleming Kevin P. Fleming 6Andrew Hudson Andrew Hudson 7Alex David Alex David 8,9Fay Sapsford Fay Sapsford 1Vardis M. Tsontos Vardis M. Tsontos 10Jorge Vazquez Jorge Vazquez 10David Vousden David Vousden 1,11
  • 1 Sargasso Sea Commission, Washington DC, United States
  • 2 Law School, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., District of Columbia, United States
  • 3 Department of Physics, School of Science, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, United Kingdom
  • 4 International Union for Conservation of Nature, Gland, Switzerland
  • 5 Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab, Duke University, Durham, NC., United States
  • 6 King's College London, London, England, United Kingdom
  • 7 United Nations Development Programme (United States), New York, New York, United States
  • 8 REV Ocean, Oslo, Norway
  • 9 University of Oxford, Oxford, England, United Kingdom
  • 10 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States
  • 11 Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    When the 2023 UN Agreement on Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity in Areas beyond Nation Jurisdiction comes into force, the Conference of Parties (COP) to the Agreement will have the power to, inter alia, designate marine protected areas (MPAs), and other "area-based management tools" (ABMTs) on the high seas. The designation of large high seas MPAs, which are more than 200 nautical miles from land, will also pose a major challenge to their proponents who will need to plan assessment and management regimes for activities taking place across potentially vast areas of open ocean. This will require exponential access to, and capacity to process, "big data"-from a large number of diverse sources across ecological, economic, scientific, and industrial domains. This article highlights the challenges of future ABNJ governance and the need for a generation shift in sensing and analysis capabilities. It shows how some of these emerging tools have been used in various domains and their advantages as well as some challenges and potential constraints. The experience of the Sargasso Sea project will be used to highlight the role of big data and AI in developing an accurate assessment of a large marine ecosystem (LME).

    Keywords: Alex Rogers: Conceptualization, methodology, Writingoriginal draft, Writingreview & editing. David Freestone: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, project administration, resources, supervision

    Received: 02 May 2024; Accepted: 15 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Freestone, Bjergstrom, Gjerde, Halpin, Fleming, Hudson, David, Sapsford, Tsontos, Vazquez and Vousden. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: David Freestone, Sargasso Sea Commission, Washington DC, DC 20009, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.