Spotlight

The Nature Conservancy collaborated with scientists from the Tropical Fish Ecology Lab at Florida International University to model and map cumulative fishing impact and reef fish biomass on Florida’s Coral Reef. The research, recently published in Aquatic...

Today the Global Mangrove Alliance (GMA) released their annual report, The State of the World’s Mangroves 2022, a compilation of the most current information available on what we know about mangrove forests and what’s being done to reverse the downward trends...

100 contributors lend expertise to first-ever The State of the World’s Mangroves publication Today the Global Mangrove Alliance released their inaugural report, The State of the World’s Mangroves, a compilation of the most current information available on what we know...

Tidal marshes are valuable natural resources, providing a wealth of ecosystem services. Ecosystem service quantification from these habitats is improving all the time and ecosystem services are already commonly used to inform decision making around marshes. A new...

Mangrove forests support millions of coastal fishers, and a new study has not only highlighted this importance but mapped how this fishing is spread around the world.

The Nature Conservancy collaborated with Alastair Harborne’s Tropical Fish Ecology Lab at Florida International University to model and map cumulative fishing impact and reef fish biomass across the the 580 km (360 miles) of coral reefs along Florida’s east coast. The models and resulting maps provide key insights for  assessing the potential benefit of conservation and management investments such as restoration and other protection activities. 

In newly-released research, authors from The Nature Conservancy, the World Resources Institute and the University of Central Florida point to some of the changes to the world of travel and tourism imposed by Covid-19, and to responses which could ultimately favour...

The world will get a much-needed overview of the state of its mangroves today as Global Mangrove Watch, a new, powerful remote sensing tool that has the potential to change the face of mangrove conservation and restoration, goes live.

Mangroves are a key habitat for our Mapping Ocean Wealth work, and its easy to see why. These coastal forests protect shorelines, store and sequester vast amounts of carbon, enhance fisheries, and even provide opportunities for recreation and tourism. but identifying and accessing the most reliable source of data can be a challenge. A new paper presents a potential solution.

Each year, people travel from all over the world to visit the Gulf of California, or the world’s aquarium, as Jacques Costeau once famously dubbed it. Sea lions, whale sharks, whales, big game fish make up the 40 key species groups that bring people to the region looking for an opportunity to interact with marine wildlife – from up-close encounters with grey whales, to witnessing the unmistakable grace and curiosity of a bull shark, to dancing with a sea lion to tracking a wahoo in a catch and release game – the Gulf of California provides an unparalleled variety of options to experience  life-changing moments.

Coastal wetlands provide many benefits, from fisheries habitat to improved water quality and shoreline protection, but they are also excellent at capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere – a service we refer to as Blue Carbon. Blue carbon habitats include salt...

After three years of research, a team of leading marine experts, led by The Nature Conservancy and Deakin University, release today a watershed report describing and mapping the economic value provided, free-of-charge, by the coastal wetlands of south-eastern...

Capitalising on the ongoing success of The Nature Conservancy’s shellfish reef restoration projects all around the world, a new manual has been published to help others do likewise. Quantifying the social and ecological benefits of shellfish reefs has been a...

In May 2019, thirty-five natural resource professionals representing ten countries and thirty agencies gathered in Rodney Bay, St. Lucia to attend an ecosystem services workshop organized by The Nature Conservancy’s Mapping Ocean Wealth team.  The workshop was...

With a global spread, mangrove tourism is much bigger than most people would imagine, worth billions of dollars with tens of millions of visitors In a new study researchers used User Generated Content (ie. TripAdvisor) to tell this story, which allowed them to not...

If you've visited oceanwealth.org recently, you may notice a few subtle, but meaningful changes.  During the first phase of Mapping Ocean Wealth the primary focus was on the data -- identifying existing sources, consulting experts, deriving new models, and creating...

The  Caribbean is more dependent on tourism than any other region across the globe, and a new study by The Nature Conservancy and JetBlue shows the powerful value of coral reef ecosystems to both the tourism industry and to the to the economic success and stability of...

Climate change is a portfolio problem. There’s no one cause, nor is there a silver bullet to fix the problem.  Rather, the solution will lie in a portfolio of measures, and many of the solutions will stem from nature. To explain how natural solutions to carbon storage...

Healthy mangroves are a precious, almost priceless resource, and yet over the past 50 years the world has witnessed staggering levels of mangrove loss and degradation. Mangroves can, quite literally save lives during storms, but losing mangroves also means losing...

The MOW team in Micronesia has published a new paper, Modelling and mapping regional-scale patterns of fishing impact and fish stocks to support coral-reef management in Micronesia in the journal Diversity and Distributions.  Led by Alastair Harborne of Florida...

The most detailed study to date of the soil carbon stored in mangrove forests has revealed that these soils hold more than 6.4 billion tons of carbon globally, according to a new paper in Environmental Research Letters. That is about 4.5 times the amount of carbon...

The Nature Conservancy, Microsoft, and Esri have formed a collaboration around geospatial technology and natural solutions for conservation and climate adaptation planning.  One of the key goals of this larger collaboration effort is to demonstrate how TNC is making...

The Mapping Ocean Wealth (MOW) Australia team (OzMOW) are currently working hard to understand the distribution and value of carbon stored in ecosystems such as mangroves, seagrass beds and saltmarshes, otherwise known as blue carbon. Methods for quantifying carbon in...

Mangroves are multi-taskers in the world of ocean wealth. In addition to providing habitat for both artisanal and commercially-fished species, sequestering carbon, and bolstering tourism, mangroves are essential for protecting coastal communities from the effects of...

**March 2018 UPDATE - The Caribbean Restoration Explorer now lives on a standalone, Caribbean-focused site: http://maps.coastalresilience.org/caribbean/   Links below have been updated to reflect the new location** The Caribbean team has developed new web-based tools...

The importance of mangrove forests – for food, carbon storage and sequestration, coastal protection, and even tourism and water purification – is widely acknowledged. So much so that there is an increasing drive not only to halt further losses, but to increase mangroves through restoration.

Review. Model. Map. Those are the stages that Mapping Ocean Wealth uses to build an understanding of various ecosystem services. In the review phase, scientists conduct a detailed and systematic exploration of field data, expert literature and knowledge to fully...

Piggybacking on the success of a similar project in Micronesia, the MOW team in the Caribbean recently completed a project to model coral reef fish production in the Bahamas.  The ability for coral reefs to produce and maintain fish stocks has implications for overall...

The Mapping Ocean Wealth Initiative is the winner of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC)’s 2017 Tourism for Tomorrow Innovation Award.  The WTTC is dedicated to promoting awareness of the travel and tourism sector’s contribution to the economy, while promoting...

Coral reefs are the poster child of nature-based tourism. Many visitors come specifically to visit the reefs themselves, to swim over shimmering gardens of coral amongst hordes of fish, but many more are unknowing beneficiaries of the reefs as producers of sand,...