As systems of marine protected areas (MPAs) expand globally, there is a risk that new MPAs will be biased toward places that are remote or unpromising for extractive activities, and hence follow the trend of terrestrial protected areas in being ‘residual’ to commercial uses. Such locations typically provide little protection to the species and ecosystems that are most exposed to threatening processes. There are strong political motivations to establish residual reserves that minimize costs and conflicts with users of natural resources. These motivations will likely remain in place as long as success continues to be measured in terms of area (km²) protected. The global pattern of MPAs was reviewed and appears to be residual, supported by a rapid growth of large, remote MPAs. The extent to which MPAs in Australia are residual nationally and also regionally within the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) Marine Park was also examined. Nationally, the recently announced Australian Commonwealth marine reserves were found to be strongly residual, making almost no difference to ‘business as usual’ for most ocean uses. Underlying this result was the imperative to minimize costs, but without the spatial constraints of explicit quantitative objectives for representing bioregions or the range of ecological features in highly protected zones. In contrast, the 2004 rezoning of the GBR was exemplary, and the potential for residual protection was limited by applying a systematic set of planning principles, such as representing a minimum percentage of finely subdivided bioregions. Nonetheless, even at this scale, protection was uneven between bioregions. Within‐bioregion heterogeneity might have led to no‐take zones being established in areas unsuitable for trawling with a risk that species assemblages differ between areas protected and areas left available for trawling. A simple four‐step framework of questions for planners and policy makers is proposed to help reverse the emerging residual tendency of MPAs and maximize their effectiveness for conservation. This involves checks on the least‐cost approach to establishing MPAs in order to avoid perverse outcomes. © 2014 The Authors. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

At the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio in June 2012, world leaders committed to the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (the high seas). Our analysis of gaps in high seas management indicates that a paradigm shift to a more systematic approach will be needed to safeguard high seas biodiversity from mounting threats. Experience from terrestrial and coastal areas indicates that a systematic approach to conservation planning and management can help to maintain ecosystem health and productivity while enabling sustainable use. Our analysis further demonstrates that the current legal regime on the high seas is insufficient to realize these objectives: management institutions have neither an adequate mandate for integrated planning nor the ability to effectively coordinate across multiple management regimes. We identify key elements for future high seas management and posit that a two‐pronged approach is most promising: the development of an improved global legal regime that incorporates systematic planning as well as the expansion of existing and new regional agreements and mandates. This combined approach is most likely to achieve the required ecosystem‐based, integrated and science‐based management that world leaders at Rio acknowledged should underpin ocean management.

Species distribution models (SDMs) have proven valuable in filling gaps in our knowledge of species occurrences. However, despite their broad applicability, SDMs exhibit critical shortcomings due to limitations in species occurrence data. These limitations include, in particular, issues related to sample size, positional uncertainty, and sampling bias. In addition, it is widely recognised that the quality of SDMs as well as the approaches used to mitigate the impact of the aforementioned data limitations depend on species ecology. While numerous studies have evaluated the effects of these data limitations on SDM performance, a synthesis of their results is lacking. However, without a comprehensive understanding of their individual and combined effects, our ability to predict the influence of these issues on the quality of modelled species–environment associations remains largely uncertain, limiting the value of model outputs. In this paper, we review studies that have evaluated the effects of sample size, positional uncertainty, sampling bias, and species ecology on SDMs outputs. We build upon their findings to provide recommendations for the critical assessment of species data intended for use in SDMs.

Geospatial data users increasingly face the need to assess how datasets fit an intended use. However, information describing data quality is typically difficult to access and understand. Therefore, data quality is often neglected by users, leading to risks of misuse. Understanding data quality is a complex task that may involve thousands of partially related metadata. For complex cases where heterogeneous datasets have to be integrated, there is a need for tools supporting data quality analysis. This paper presents the design of such a tool that can manage heterogeneous data quality information and provide functions to support expert users in the assessment of the fitness for use of a given dataset. Combining concepts from GIS and Business Intelligence, this approach provides interactive, multi‐granularity and context‐sensitive spatial data quality indicators that help experts to build and justify their opinions. A prototype called the Multidimensional User Manual is presented to illustrate this approach.