Putting ocean wilderness on the map: Building a global GIS atlas of pristine marine environments

Terrestrial conservation has long recognized the need for setting global priorities, and a common strategy for such efforts has been to focus on wilderness, or pristine, areas. Only recently have conservation groups begun to consider marine ecosystems, and efforts to take a global approach remain nascent at best. In order to move forward, conservation groups need global-scale data on which to base their priority models, but such data are currently highly dispersed and poorly synthesized. We propose a working group to address two questions that should greatly help close this gap: first, what is a pristine marine ecosystem, and second, where are the remaining pristine areas of the world¿s oceans? The definition of pristine will be based on an ecologically rigorous assessment of anthropogenic influences on marine ecosystems, and will guide us in identifying existing global-scale datasets that we will use to map the distribution of pristine areas across all marine environments. Our final product will be a GIS-based, interactive atlas of the pristine and impacted areas of the ocean that can be used as a practical tool by conservation groups in developing marine conservation priority models, by academic scientists in future ecological and biogeographic research, and by educators in efforts to increase awareness of ocean conservation needs.