Lewis and Clark as Naturalists

ADVERTISEMENT

The CBD works with many other organizations devoted to biodiversity along the world’s coasts and in open waters. International agreements are particularly needed in marine conservation because the ocean is an open space used by many nations.

Marine organisms produce one-third of the oxygen humans breath, yet people tend to forget about the ocean when they think of biodiversity. The ocean has long been treated with disregard because it is a free-access resource. As such, industries and individuals have erroneously assumed that a little of their wastes dumped into the water cannot possibly harm the vast ocean. The fact that people usually cannot observe ocean pollution compounds the problem. Moreover, the marine habitat is not a single, homogeneous area that quickly digests wastes; it is a combination of specialized and sensitive ecosystems.

Marine ecosystems include coastal areas as well as the high seas. The most important marine ecosystems are the following: coral reefs, mangrove swamps, delta marshes, seagrasses, algae and phytoplankton, pelagic (open) waters, and deep-sea waters. Coastal areas contribute a disproportionate amount to marine biodiversity. For instance, marine biologists point out that though coasts account for only 10 percent of the globe’s ocean, they contain 90 percent of all marine species. Moreover, only a small portion of coastal habitat is protected by environmental laws. One such protection in the United States are Marine Protected Areas, marine areas temporarily or permanently closed to harvesting resources. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts described the benefits of protected areas in Oceanus magazine in 2008. This entry

 

U.S. coastal zones have been protected since 1972 by the federal Coastal Zone
Management Act, which established a national program for conserving, protecting,
and restoring coastal areas. These zones include wetlands and estuaries, seen here in
the Everglades, as well as dunes and coral reefs. (Everglades National Park)

describes the Georges Bank protected area: “These closures have given us a unique opportunity to examine a marine protected area in a temperate system under a ‘macroscope’—to examine how marine ecosystems are structured and how they function and recover.” As this article attests, protected marine areas give scientists their best opportunities to study and save species.

Pollution, invasive species, and global warming threaten marine ecosystems as much as they harm land ecosystems. Marine ecosystems also contend with eutrophication and overfishing. Marine research, furthermore, lags behind the science of land ecosystems because deep-sea waters remain largely a mystery; they are difficult to reach and difficult to study. The list below contains some of what we know about the perilous state of marine ecosystems.

• 50 percent of wetlands have been lost to agriculture and urbanization
• 10 percent of beaches have been lost to rising ocean levels and development
• 50 percent of coral reefs are threatened; at least 20 percent have already died
• 40 percent of mangrove swamps have been lost to agriculture and development

Another obstacle to studying and protecting ocean ecosystems is that open waters belong to no single governing body. International organizations now cooperate on almost every aspect of marine biodiversity, and they have solicited the help of governments and universities. Maritime laws also exist to stop ocean pollution, illegal fishing, coral harvesting,
and other assaults on ocean ecosystems. These laws are difficult to enforce, however, because of the huge expanse of ocean they cover. Conservation International has pointed out that almost all of the ocean’s biodiversity hotspots, called seascapes by this organization, cover large areas inside and outside national ocean boundaries. Of all biomes the oceans may be in the greatest need of international cooperation for preserving biodiversity.