Webinars

This webinar originally aired on Tuesday, July 8, 2025. Presented by: Mike Elliott of International Estuarine & Coastal Specialists (IECS) Ltd., and the School of Environmental and Life Sciences, The University of Hull (Emeritus Professor). Description: This webinar will present and explain cause-consequence-response frameworks and the way these relate to managing marine, coastal and estuarine areas. It will then show the importance of determining the footprints of activities, pressures, and natural and human effects and assessing cumulative effects. Following this, it will consider the footprints of management responses and will demonstrate horizontal management across sectors and vertical management from the local to the global and vice versa. It will look at the importance of transboundary implications of marine management, considering connectivity, coherence, and equivalence. Finally, it will consider the way in which success in marine management is measured, including indicators of success. Examples from Europe and North America will be used, but the topics are relevant to marine areas worldwide.

This webinar originally aired on Wednesday, June 18, 2025. Presented by: Nick Wise of OceanMind. Description: OceanMind uses satellites, artificial intelligence (AI), and extensive marine enforcement expertise to help authorities monitor and enforce their MPAs; detect, deter, and prevent illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing; and support Port State Measure Agreement implementation. OceanMind also provides tailored capacity building and enforcement training for fisheries authorities. This webinar will provide an overview of how advanced technology can be used for effective enforcement of marine regulation, including case studies from the UK’s network of MPAs that cover almost 4.5 million square kilometres in some of the most remote locations on the planet, drawing comparisons to the enforcement needs of high seas MPAs.

This webinar originally aired on Thursday, May 29, 2025. Presented by: Patrick Nichols of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Elizabeth Farquhar of North Carolina State University, and Jessi Florendo of the Puget Sound Restoration Fund. Description: Join us to hear from the winners of the 2025 Ocean Innovator Award opportunity, which recognizes and promotes innovative ocean-related research and applied solutions. Early career professionals from around the globe submitted creative presentations about their innovative projects related to coastal, ocean, and estuarine environments. The three winners were selected by a team of expert reviewers across several dimensions of the ocean and coastal career field. Winners include: 1st Place: Patrick Nichols, “Harnessing Environmental DNA to Track a Cryptogenic Nuisance Alga (Chondria tumulosa) that is Threatening Pacific Coral Reefs”; 2nd Place: Elizabeth Farquhar, “Developing a Low-Cost, IoT Device for Estimating Air–Water ΔpCO2 in Coastal Environments”; and 3rd Place: Jessi Florendo, “Bull Kelp Restoration through Kelp Community Gardening”. The next award cycle will open in February, 2026. To learn more about the Ocean Innovators Award, please visit www.sea-shoresolutions.com/oia.

This webinar originally aired on Wednesday, May 14, 2025. Presented by: Claire Colegrove and Alex Driedger of ProtectedSeas. Description: While hundreds of nations have committed to the global 30×30 target, much work remains to reach that goal and sustainably manage the remaining 70%. Regulatory protections are crucial for marine management efficacy, and accurate data on in-place management measures are essential for assessing existing marine protections and informing the creation of new areas. However, collecting and interpreting marine regulations can be challenging due to often unavailable or difficult-to-access legal instruments. Overlapping measures and siloed management add further complexities. ProtectedSeas Navigator contains data on worldwide regulations for MPAs, fishery management areas, and other place-based marine managed areas (MMAs) and considers restrictions cumulatively across overlapping areas using spatial aggregation techniques to provide insights into overall protection. This cumulative analysis of regulations in overlapping marine managed areas offers insights into overall uses and protection across ocean spaces, enabling better protection assessments, planning, and management. As an example, initial analysis in California revealed several ocean spaces where individual MMA protections were minimal, yet when combined with protections from other overlapping MMAs, resulted in more highly regulated spaces with enhanced protection.

This webinar originally aired on Thursday, April 24, 2025. Presented by: Fabrice Stephenson of Newcastle University UK, Jenna Sullivan-Stack of Oregon State University, Beth Pike of Marine Conservation Institute, and Estradivari of the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) – all of IUCN WCPA. Overview: This talk will explore the topic of fishing in different types of marine protected and conserved areas in the ocean, and introduce a new dedicated IUCN WCPA task force that will address knowledge gaps and advance best practices for management. Protected and conserved areas experience a spectrum of impacts from extraction, ranging from fully or strictly protected areas with no extraction to multiple-use zones that allow activities like fishing. Although biodiversity conservation outcomes are expected from all of these areas, uncertainties persist regarding which fisheries, at what scale and intensity, align with conservation objectives, including the definition of ‘industrial’ fishing. This presentation will discuss existing guidance (including the IUCN Protected Area Management Categories and the MPA Guide), explore remaining uncertainties, and share a vision for the role of the new task force in helping to resolve these uncertainties.

This webinar originally aired on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Presented by: Christine Ward-Paige of eOceans and Mike Appleton of Re:Wild. Description: Protected areas don’t protect themselves—dedicated people do. On land, the protected area workforce, including rangers, plays a critical role in safeguarding biodiversity, yet for decades their contributions were undervalued, leading to job insecurity, lack of resources, and limited career pathways. A global terrestrial workforce study has shown that the workforce is too small to deliver global expectations and has helped lead the way in defining who rangers are, quantifying their contributions, and advocating for better support, training, and rights. Now, we’re expanding this effort to the ocean. To achieve 30×30 — estimated at 345,000 new MPAs — the world needs a massive scale-up of skilled, high-quality jobs to manage and enforce Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) effectively, especially in the face of diversifying ocean economies and accelerating ocean warming and acidification. But how many people currently work in MPAs? What do they do? What challenges do they face? How do they overcome these challenges? And what will it take to build a workforce capable of managing a truly global MPA network? Join us to explore what we know so far, what we hope to uncover, and how you can get involved. Your input can help shape the future of the MPA workforce—and, ultimately, the success of ocean conservation worldwide.

This webinar originally aired on Wednesday, April 2, 2025. Presented by: Bob Farrell, WildAid. Description: Enforcement is a critical, but often overlooked, component of properly managing priority marine areas. The cost of enforcement can also be of concern. We will discuss WildAid’s “BLUEPRINT for Marine Protection™” a highly effective tool designed to evaluate and focus capacity building effort for enforcement. We will also discuss the use of various technologies to enhance enforcement and mitigate cost. We will discuss the use of Skylight and Global Fishing Watch as potential sources of intelligence that are free to most users. We will also discuss our partnership with Open Ocean Robotics and the use of their on-water technology to support enforcement.

This webinar originally aired on Tuesday, March 11, 2025. Presented by: Erich Hoyt, Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara, Gill Braulik, and Simone Panigada of the IMMA Secretariat of the IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force. Description: Important Marine Mammal Areas, or IMMAs, are making waves for conservation as a valuable science-based tool that highlights the most important areas and habitats for marine mammals globally. This webinar will provide an overview of the 10-year program to bring expert analysis and peer review to the identification of the habitats of whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, manatees, dugong, sea otters, and polar bears. To date, the global IMMA effort has examined 80% of the ocean and identified 321 IMMAs and 196 Areas of Interest. Governments are now using IMMA layers for marine spatial planning and designing MPAs, and conservation groups, shipping companies, and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) are using IMMAs to slow down or reroute vessels to reduce the risk of shipstrikes. This webinar will spotlight more than 40 new IMMAs for the Northwest Atlantic Ocean and Wider Caribbean; show how IMMAs can be used for many ocean planning and conservation initiatives; and discuss where IMMAs are going in 2025 and beyond.

This webinar originally aired on Wednesday, March 5, 2025. Presented by: Natalia Montero and Ibon Galparsoro of AZTI. Description: Ecosystem-based marine spatial planning (EB-MSP) is a holistic approach to MSP. It embeds the principles of the ecosystem-based approach (EBA) into the planning process with the aim of jointly managing sustainable human activities and environmental health by accounting for ecosystem processes. However, despite the growing recognition of its benefits, EB-MSP is generally not fully implemented in management plans. The EB-MSP assessment tool is a comprehensive Decision Support System (DSS) which aligns each step of the EB-MSP implementation process to the required data, knowledge and tools. The DSS enable both strategic guidance and technical solutions based on best practices to deliver a comprehensive EB-MSP. The tool is available at https://aztidata.es/EB-MSP, and a new open access publication about the tool is available https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01975-7.

This webinar originally aired on Wednesday, February 26, 2025. Presented by: Shanondora Billiot (United Houma Nation Citizen), Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Arizona State University; Yolanda López-Maldonado (Yucatan, Mexico), Human Ecologist and Geographer; and Mr. Dune Lankard (Eyak Athabaskan), President and Founder of Native Conservancy. Description: Current demands on freshwater, driven by climate change and population growth, have led municipalities, water stewards, and academics to focus on conserving scarce freshwater resources. This shift has spotlighted the concept of a circular water economy—a system that emphasizes conserving and reusing freshwater instead of conventional methods of limited treatment and discharge. While circularity may seem novel from a modern, Western perspective, Indigenous cultures have practiced it for millennia, embedding it into their ways of life and environmental stewardship. This webinar will explore these enduring cultural practices and their modern implications for conservation, policy, and ecology. Participants will gain insight into the foundational principles of circularity and the essential role Indigenous peoples play in sustaining these practices. This session, featuring Indigenous scholars Dr. Shanondora Billiot (United Houma Nation Citizen), Dr. Yolanda López-Maldonado (Yucatan, Mexico), and Mr. Dune Lankard (Eyak Athabaskan) alongside other experts in policy and water rights, will highlight how traditional knowledge can guide contemporary water management approaches.