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Conservation Science
Marine Science
Oceans cover more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface and harbor extraordinary levels of biodiversity. All but one of the animal "body plans" (phyla) on earth are found in the oceans, and 45 percent of them are exclusively marine. Many parts of the oceans and seas are still unexplored and new species are discovered on a regular basis. While it was thought for decades that the resources of the seas were inexhaustible, habitat destruction, overfishing, climate change and pollution now severely threaten marine biodiversity and important fisheries.
WWF's Conservation Science Program is working to ensure that WWF's marine conservation efforts are based on sound science. Currently, our main foci are ecoregional planning, the development of marine protected areas (MPAs) and marine MPA networks, and conservation of specific marine species.
Marine Ecoregions of the World
MEOW is a biogeographic classification of the world's coasts and shelves. It is the first ever comprehensive marine classification system with clearly defined boundaries and definitions and was developed to closely link to existing regional systems. The ecoregions nest within the broader biogeographic tiers of Realms and Provinces.
MEOW represents broad-scale patterns of species and communities in the ocean, and was designed as a tool for planning conservation across a range of scales and assessing conservation efforts and gaps worldwide. The current system focuses on coast and shelf areas (as this is where the majority of human activity and conservation action is focused) and does not consider realms in pelagic or deep benthic environment. It is hoped that parallel but distinct systems for pelagic and deep benthic biotas will be devised in the near future.
Ecoregional planning
In the last five years, the Conservation Science Program has worked with other WWF programs to develop biodiversity visions in the Bering Sea, Gulf of California, Mesoamerican Reef, Coastal East Africa and Coral Triangle ecoregions. These visions provide a biological basis for determining priorities for conservation action on the ground.
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)
The science of developing functionally connected, representative and resilient networks of MPAs is relatively young and progressing rapidly. We are putting these scientific advancements to work in a number of tropical marine ecoregions. Our work, in collaboration with a variety of other organizations, can be sampled in the document Coral Bleaching and Marine Protected Areas (PDF, 3.56M). We are also collaborating with NOAA to analyze global datasets on sea temperatures and recorded coral bleaching events to identify areas that appear resistant to bleaching. These areas may be important candidates for placing MPAs that can resist rising sea temperatures due to climate change.
Download the WWF Marine Science Factsheet
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