Juan Sebastian Mayorga

• Masters of Environmental Science & Management
• Analyst at University of California, Santa Barbara

More than half the fish in the sea As the human population has grown in recent decades, our dependence on ocean-supplied protein has rapidly increased. Kroodsma et al. took advantage of the automatic identification system installed on all industrial fishing vessels to map and quantify fishing efforts across the world (see the Perspective by Polocza...

Commercial bottom trawl and dredge fisheries are active across much of Europe, and their geographic footprint is extensive. More than half of seabed area is trawled every year in some parts of Europe. But these fisheries remain contentious; significant ecological and economic damages have been well documented. Yet, they remain a source of food and...

Marine and coastal tourism deliver economic benefits to coastal communities that far surpass those generated by fisheries, yet its potential contribution to global marine conservation remains underexamined. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) help restore biodiversity and enhance nearby fisheries, but their direct tourism benefits are not well understood...

The countries of the world agreed to protect at least 30% of the global ocean by 2030 (30x30), from the current 8% under some kind of protection. However, there is no roadmap for achieving this global target. We find that, to achieve the protection of 30% of the exclusive economic zones of countries (EEZs), the world needs to establish 190,000 new...

Estimates of home range sizes for marine fishes are essential for designing and assessing the effects of spatial wildlife conservation policies and management interventions. However, in situ studies of marine species movement are challenging and often expensive, resulting in a paucity of data on the home range size of the vast majority of marine fi...

Informe de la expedición científica de National Geographic Pristine Seas - 2022 (al corazón de la costa Pacífica colombiana). Report of the National Geographic Pristine Seas scientific expedition - 2022 (to the heart of the Pacific coast of Colombia).

When fisheries managers cannot see who is fishing or where fishing occurs, their scope for management interventions is limited. This lack of transparency in spatial fishing activity is considered a key enabler of illegal fishing and overfishing and hinders managers and consumers who aim to achieve sustainable fisheries. Increasing transparency in v...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a key tool for achieving goals for biodiversity conservation and human well-being, including improving climate resilience and equitable access to nature. At a national level, they are central components in the U.S. commitment to conserve at least 30% of U.S. waters by 2030. By definition, the primary goal of an MPA...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03496-1.

The ocean contains unique biodiversity, provides valuable food resources and is a major sink for anthropogenic carbon. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are an effective tool for restoring ocean biodiversity and ecosystem services1,2, but at present only 2.7% of the ocean is highly protected³. This low level of ocean protection is due largely to confli...

The Amazon Basin is at the center of an intensifying discourse about deforestation, land-use, and global change. To date, climate research in the Basin has overwhelmingly focused on the cycling and storage of carbon (C) and its implications for global climate. Missing, however, is a more comprehensive consideration of other significant biophysical...

Today, mankind lives mainly in densely populated urban areas around the world. In Mexico, 80% of its population is urban and they develop their lives in a global context such as climate change and now the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. The United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I) was established in 1976 in Vancouver, whose main...

Informe de las Expediciones de National Geographic Pristine Seas y Comunidades Kawésqar y Yagán.

Seafood companies rarely disclose what or where they are fishing. To provide a first overview of the fishing industry in the high seas—the area beyond national jurisdiction—we linked fishing activity in the high seas to vessel owners and corporate actors. We identified 1,120 corporate actors for 2,482 vessels (∼2/3 of high seas fishing vessels and...

Contrary to most terrestrial organisms, which release their carbon into the atmosphere after death, carcasses of large marine fish sink and sequester carbon in the deep ocean. Yet, fisheries have extracted a massive amount of this “blue carbon,” contributing to additional atmospheric CO 2 emissions. Here, we used historical catches and fuel consump...

Significance Strategically siting marine protected areas (MPAs) in overfished fisheries can have important conservation and food provisioning benefits. We use distribution data for 1,338 commercially important fisheries stocks around the world to model how MPAs in different locations would affect catch. We show that strategically expanding the exis...

Open up, share and network information so that marine stewardship can mitigate climate change, overfishing and pollution. Open up, share and network information so that marine stewardship can mitigate climate change, overfishing and pollution.

One of the aims of the United Nations (UN) negotiations on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) is to develop a legal process for the establishment of area-based management tools, including marine protected areas, in ABNJ. Here we use a conservation planning algorithm to integrate...

To develop more accurate global carbon (C) budgets and to better inform management of human activities in the ocean, we need high-resolution estimates of marine C stocks. Here we quantify global marine sedimentary C stocks at a 1-km resolution, and find that marine sediments store 2322 (2239–2391) Pg C in the top 1 m (nearly twice that of terrestri...

The Global Deal for Nature (GDN) is a time-bound, science-driven plan to save the diversity and abundance of life on Earth. Pairing the GDN and the Paris Climate Agreement would avoid catastrophic climate change, conserve species, and secure essential ecosystem services. New findings give urgency to this union: Less than half of the terrestrial rea...

Shark sanctuaries are an ambitious attempt to protect huge areas of ocean space to curtail overfishing of sharks. If shark sanctuaries are to succeed, effective surveillance and enforcement is urgently needed. We use a case study with a high level of illegal shark fishing within a shark sanctuary to help motivate three actionable opportunities to c...

Amoroso et al. demonstrate the power of our data by estimating the high-resolution trawling footprint on seafloor habitat. Yet we argue that a coarser grid is required to understand full ecosystem impacts. Vessel tracking data allow us to estimate the footprint of human activities across a variety of scales, and the proper scale depends on the spec...

The patterns by which different nations share global fisheries influence outcomes for food security, trajectories of economic development, and competition between industrial and small-scale fishing. We report patterns of industrial fishing effort for vessels flagged to higher- and lower-income nations, in marine areas within and beyond national jur...

While the ecological impacts of fishing the waters beyond national jurisdiction (the “high seas”) have been widely studied, the economic rationale is more difficult to ascertain because of scarce data on the costs and revenues of the fleets that fish there. Newly compiled satellite data and machine learning now allow us to track individual fishing...

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing global fisheries is that recovery often requires substantial short-term reductions in fishing effort, catches and profits. These costs can be onerous and are borne in the present; thus, many countries are unwilling to undertake such socially and politically unpopular actions. We argue that many nations can reco...

Es sabido que Donoso utilizó en 1849 la analogía entre el mila-gro como fenómeno excepcional en la naturaleza y la dictaduraco-mo situación excepcional en el Estado, para probar que circunstan-cias excepcionales exigen decisiones excepcionales^ Mucho menos conocido es que ya en 1837 el aún liberal Donoso había defendido lo esencial de esa teoría^....

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