New Zealand (Linz) update in the GeoGarage platform

1 nautical raster chart update

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Elemen'Terre project

Elemen'Terre project of Marie Tabarly

The Elemen’Terre Project is a documentary series devoted to nature.

The aim is to travel the world and to discover the beauties of nature
through a boat trip ('Pen Duik VI'), arts and outdoor sports.

The objective is also to allow a soul-searching journey.

Through travel and sports we learn to go beyond our limits, we cultivate a certain mindset and we develop a stronger connection between mind and body.

The concept of The Elemen’Terre Project is to discover a different place on the planet at every episode through two personalities.

Each time, one artist and one athlete will join me in order to share different sensitivities and their respective visions of the world.

We will travel by boat for two weeks to meet other cultures, other horizons.

We will observe wild animals crossing our path and will marvel at all different playgrounds provided by nature for us to practise all kind of sports.
The Elemen’Terre Project is a series of documentaries shot under real-life conditions.

I do not want to force people to open up, neither do I want to perform any voyeurism.

I like to take the time to discover people at their own pace, respecting their silences while enjoying every word they say.

My two guests will join the crew in the same way we join a family : by taking part in the daily life onboard, in sailing manœuvres, in conversations…

"Living is to make memories from our dreams" (Sylvain Tesson)

Nine of world's biggest fishing firms sign up to protect oceans

From The Guardian by Fiona Harvey

Voluntary initiative marks first time companies from Asia, Europe and US have joined together to stop overfishing, illegal catch and use of slave labour

Nine of the world’s biggest fishing companies have signed up to protect the world’s oceans, pledging to help stamp out illegal activities, including the use of slave labour, and prevent overfishing.

The initiative will be announced on Friday, as part of the UN Ocean Conference this week in New York, the first conference of its kind at which member states are discussing how to meet the sustainable development goal on ocean health.

Chilean purse seine

Goal 14 of the roster requires countries to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources”.
However, little has yet been done to set out concrete commitments on meeting this target.
The UN is hoping countries, companies and organisations will set out voluntary plans this week to work on issues such as pollution, overfishing, the destruction of coastal habitats, and acidification.

The Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship (SeaBOS) initiative, supported by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, marks the first time that companies from Asia, Europe and the US have come together aiming to end unsustainable practices.
Although the fishing industry is highly fragmented at the local level, with millions of small boats and subsistence fishermen, about 11 to 16% of the global catch goes to just 13 companies, who are thought to control about 40% of the most valuable and biggest species.

Henrik Osterblöm, deputy science director at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which brought the initiative together, said: “Sustainable marine ecosystems will be essential to feed a growing population, but the oceans are at risk. Seafood makes up 20% of the global intake of animal protein.”

The nine fishing companies signed up to SeaBOS have a combined annual revenue of about $30bn (£23bn), making up more than one-third of that of the top 100 seafood companies.
They pledged to eliminate from their supply chains any fish that could have come from piracy or other illegal sources.
As much as half the world’s fish catch is thought to involve “black” or illegal fishing, where vessels trespass into other national waters, use illegal gear, catch more than their quota or target endangered species or fish for which they have no quota.
These fish are often “laundered” to find their way into legal fish markets.

Slavery has also been a serious problem in fisheries, as spotlighted by the Guardian’s investigation into slavery in the Thai prawn fishing industry, which found worker exploitation and the deprivation of people’s rights was widespread in parts of Asia’s fishing grounds.
The new declaration binds SeaBOS members to develop and enforce a code of conduct for their operations and those of their suppliers.

The companies said: “We will also work towards full traceability and transparency throughout our supply chains. We also pledge to work actively together with governments to improve existing regulations for fisheries, for aquaculture, and for the ocean.”

Fish farms have also been a cause of concern to ocean experts, with the heavy use of medicines and disinfectants causing marine pollution, and the use of millions of tonnes of fishmeal from ground-up wild fish to provide food for the farmed fish – as much as five tonnes of wild fish for every tonne of farmed.

These factors undermine the claims of the fish farming industry to provide a sustainable source of fish, protecting wild populations.
The SeaBOS signatories pledged: “We [will] make efficient use of aquaculture and use fish feed resources from sustainably harvested stocks. We will actively use and apply existing certification standards and prevent harmful discharges and habitat destruction. We call on the whole industry to do the same.”

SeaBOS comprises: the two biggest seafood companies by revenue, Maruha Nichiro and Nippon Suisan Kaisha; two of the biggest tuna specialists, Thai Union Group and Dongwon Industries; the two biggest companies selling feed to fish farms, Nutreco (parent company of Skretting) and Cargill Aqua Nutrition; and the two biggest farmed salmon companies, Marine Harvest and the Cermaq subsidiary of Mitsubishi; and the Japanese tuna purse seine company Kyokuyo.
Most of these are not household names to consumers, but their products are found all over the world. The group aims to sign up more companies, and to lobby governments to enforce better regulations, and to review its progress in a year.

Links :

• Pew : Timeline: Fisheries Management in North-Western European Waters
• DW : 5 biggest threats to our oceans - and what we can do about them
• GeoGarage blog : Getting serious about overfishing / Why we've been hugely underestimating the overfishing ... / Farm-raised tuna may not be the answer to overfishing

New ocean reserve, largest in Africa, protects whales and turtles

The ocean faces many challenges, but has the extraordinary power to replenish when it is protected.

Marine protected areas facilitate resilience and recovery for degraded areas of the ocean, and offer opportunities to rebuild stocks of commercially important species.

Additionally, protected marine ecosystems can offer long term economic and recreational benefits which can be enjoyed for generations to come, provided that proper enforcement and oversight is practiced within these areas.

From National Geographic by Laura Parker

Gabon’s announcement also restricts overfishing and may help with climate resilience.

The central African nation of Gabon announced Monday the creation of Africa’s largest network of marine protected areas, home to a diverse array of threatened marine life, including the largest breeding populations of leatherback and olive ridley sea turtles and 20 species of dolphins and whales.

 Gabon waters with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM map)

 courtesy of MPAtlas

The network of 20 marine parks and aquatic reserves will protect 26 percent of Gabon’s territorial seas and extend across 20,500 square miles (53,000 square kilometers).
In creating the protected areas, the Gabon government also set up what scientists call the most sustainable fisheries management plan for West Africa—an area long known for rampant overfishing and abuses by foreign fleets.
Separate zones have been established for commercial and artisanal fishing fleets, in an effort to restore sustainable fishing.

The Atlantic oast in Gabon's Loango National Park is nicknamed "Africa's last Eden"

photo by Michael Nichols (NGC)

“West Africa is an area which has incredibly rich oceans, but it is being bled dry by international fishing fleets,” says Callum Roberts, a marine conservation biologist at the University of York in Great Britain.
“In the space of a few decades, the waters of West Africa have moved from being a cornucopia of marine life to something that is far reduced from that. Protection is urgently needed to rebalance fish resources.”

Mediterranean Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have an important role in providing ecosystem services, mitigating the impacts of climate change and increasing ecological and socioeconomic resilience of biodiversity and surrounding coastal communities. Increasing the number of MPAs and developing appropriate management actions within them are essential to maintain the natural resilience of marine habitats against climate change impacts in the Mediterranean.

 Roberts, who has spent more than three decades studying ocean health, argues in a new paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that marine protected areas, which already help restore fish populations, also help marine ecosystems adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Large, fully intact ecosystems are healthier and better armed to adapt to what Roberts calls the “killer cocktail” of ocean acidification, intense storms, sea-level rise, shifts in species distribution, and decreased oxygen availability in the deep ocean.
Reduced oxygen is already visible in the Pacific and Atlantic, Roberts says, where nutrient-poor “ocean deserts” increased by 15 percent between 1998 and 2006.
“Fishing has had the greatest impact on the ocean ecosystems,” Roberts says.
“But climate change is rapidly catching up, and in some ecosystems, has taken the lead.”

Roberts doesn’t claim marine protected areas help marine habitats resist climate change.
Rather, he says that healthier habitats makes them more resilient.
Coral reefs, for example, can’t be protected from rising ocean temperatures.
But protecting reefs from overfishing, dredging, and runoff pollution can decrease the sensitivity of corals to ocean warming and help them recover from floods or bleaching events.
The Chagos Marine Protected Area in the remote Indian Ocean now has a reef free from human-caused stresses that, in turn, contributed to a remarkable capacity to recover. More than 90 percent of the reef died in a 1998 bleaching event.
But by 2010, the reef had recovered.

Likewise, a marine protected area in Baja, California saw a ten-fold increase of predatory fish within a decade after a marine protection area was established.

Networks of marine protected areas can also provide stepping stones, or safe “landing zones” for colonizing species as they move northward to cooler waters, he says.
The Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the northwest Hawaiian Islands provided a “strategic refuge” for coral reef ecosystems that may be forced poleward by climate change.

“When we introduce protection, the only way to go is up,” he says.
“We see it in recoveries of big species that grow to very old ages. The bigger and older things get in the sea, the more productive they begin to be in terms of offspring. They are like fountains, pouring offspring, like larvae, into the water, which then gets transported by ocean currents and reseeds other areas. This is a positive way to counter climate change.”

 MPAs (2015 National Geographic map)

Less than 3% currently protected

The world has 11,212 marine protected areas.
But combined, they protect just 2.98 percent of the oceans, according to the Marine Conservation Institute, a marine science nonprofit based in Seattle.

Two other measures fill in the picture.
If the high seas is discounted, the remaining marine reserves protect 7.29 percent of marine habitats that lie within the 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zones of all countries.
And if only no-take protected areas are counted, where fishing and all other extraction, such as mining, is prohibited, only 1.63 percent of the world’s oceans are covered.

The no-take reserves are the strongest, but not well distributed across the globe, says Russell Moffitt, the institute’s conservation analyst.
There are only about a dozen very large protected areas, including those in offshore territories of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monuments, and Great Britain’s Pitcairn, and Chagos marine reserves.

The United Nations, which this week convened its first-ever ocean conference in New York to address declining ocean health, has been pushing the world’s nations to protect 10 percent of the oceans by 2020.
Some 500 new marine protected areas have been proposed, but many of those proposals have stalled or are languishing in committee and face long odds.

Chile’s plans to create the Americas’ largest marine protected area to protect Easter Island fish stocks has bogged down in negotiations with the Rapa Nui, the island’s indigenous people.
Likewise, proposed large marine parks in the Cook Islands and New Zealand’s Kermadec Islands have yet to materialize.

Roberts and other marine scientists argue that the UN’s goals are not ambitious enough.
What’s really needed to restore the oceans to health, they say, is to protect 30 percent of the oceans in reserves.

“Ten percent is a good step toward the goal, but we need to follow the science,” says Matt Rand, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts Bertarelli Ocean Legacy.
“We need bold decision-makers, all pushing to reach the target that scientists have set. It is the next generation that faces the consequences of our efforts, or lack thereof.”

“A big deal”

Gabon is among a handful of nations that has already met the UN’s goal; it doubled it and did it three years early.
But it wasn’t easy.
It took a decisive president who saw up close what was at stake.

The project also involved years of effort by conservation groups and government agencies, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Waitt Foundation, the Gabonese National Parks Agency, and National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project, which surveyed Gabon’s 550-mile (885-kilometer) coastline during a one-month expedition in 2012.
Both examples of the treasures that lay hidden beneath the surface and the threats posed by illegal fisheries were presented to Gabon President Ali Bongo Ondimba on board Waitt’s research vessel, Plan B.
Then and there, Ondimba decided to act and the plan to create the marine network was born.

“The richness that we saw underwater in Gabon during our Pristine Seas expedition in 2012 blew our minds, but also (showed) the threats, mostly from industrial fishing,” says Enric Sala, National Geographic Explorer in Residence and marine scientist who helped Gabon develop their marine protected network.

The plan was announced in 2014 and refined over the next three years into the new network of 20 parks and reserves.
The largest protected area is the “La Reserve Aquatique du Grand Sud du Gabon,” which extends protection of the existing Mayumba National Park to the 200-mile nautical mile limit of Gabon’s exclusive economic zone.
It protects 27,000 square kilometers (10,425 square miles) of marine habitats from the beach to ocean depths of four kilometers (2.5 miles).

“This is a big deal and an example for other countries,” Sala says. “If Gabon can do it, why can’t European countries, for example?”

Links :

• Seeker : Marine Reserves Renew Hope in the Fight Against Climate Change
• Blue Marine Foundation : Scientists find that marine reserves help tackle climate change
• GeoGarage blog : Future of Antarctic marine protected areas is at risk / World's largest marine park created in Ross Sea in ... / The race for vast remote 'marine protected areas' may be ... / Obama to create the largest protected place on the planet ... / World's largest single marine reserve created in Pacific / MarineMap a web-based tool for MPAs

France & misc. (SHOM) update in the GeoGarage platform

All the nautical paper maps from the SHOM catalogue

(except 30 coastal charts originally from the Admiralty and figuring in the UK & misc. layer)

are right now included in the GeoGarage platform (France + international SHOM charts)

99 charts added (119 including insets) mainly for Portugal, Spain & Italy
in this last 2017 upgrade (v3) including all the international charts figuring in the SHOM catalogue
already published in v1 / v2 2017 (UK, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Croatia, Greece, African countries)
-> see GeoGarage news

Mediterranean sea coverage from Spain to Greece including Maghreb countries