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BirdLife has taken a major step towards the identification of Marine Important Bird Areas (mIBAs) for seabirds around the globe, establishing guidelines which can be used to track seabirds and analyse the data to identify Marine IBAs for any seabird species. Seabirds have deteriorated in IUCN Red List status faster than any other group of bird species.

The world’s oceans are seriously under-protected. Just 0.65% of the global ocean is within protected area systems, and most of that is within the first miles of the shore. As a result, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the World Summit on Sustainable Development set a target to establish a globally representative network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) by 2012. However, IUCN estimates that unless progress is accelerated, this goal will not be met until 2060 - half a century late.

Identifying and protecting Marine Important Bird Areas (mIBAs) for seabirds around the globe will make a vital contribution towards the global MPA target, and is a key focus for BirdLife’s Global Seabird Programme.

Seabird conservation presents some unique challenges, not least because many species spend the majority of their lives at sea. Therefore to identify Marine IBAs, BirdLife has been refining methods developed for land and freshwater sites to ensure they work in the marine environment. In order to achieve this, BirdLife recently organised a series of workshops to compare the merits of different methods used to study the movements of seabirds, and tested the best ways of analysing the datasets gained from such studies.

BirdLife and its Partners are now focussing upon getting the outcomes of the workshops endorsed by the CBD at the upcoming September meeting in Ottawa, Canada. This meeting will consider the criteria, and methods, for identification of biologically and ecologically significant areas on the high seas.

Sourced from BirdLife - full article