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UN-OCEANS encompasses most UN operations relating to the oceans. After the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, Agenda 21 - "an international programme of action for global sustainable development for the 21st century" - was adopted (UN-OCEANS, 2005). Chapter 17 of Agenda 21 calls for protection of the oceans, resulting in the formation of the Sub-committee on Oceans and Coastal Areas of the Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC SOCA) in 1993. Due to the extensive number of agencies and committees already addressing the issue of the oceans and the need for a "new inter-agency coordinating mechanism," in September 2003, "the United Nations High-Level Committee on Programmes approved the creation of an Oceans and Coastal Areas Network (subsequently named 'UN-OCEANS') to build on SOCA" (UN-OCEANS, 2005). As stated on its Web site, UN-OCEANS has been established to:
Wiki Markup - Review the relevant programmes and activities of the United Nations system, undertaken as part of its contribution to the implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Agenda 21 and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation;
- Identify emerging issues, define joint actions and establish specific task teams to deal with these, as appropriate;
- Promote the integrated management of oceans at the international level...;
- Promote the coherence of United Nations system activities on oceans and coastal area... (UN-OCEANS, 2005).
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International Council for the Exploration of the Seas
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The International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) is a scientific organization based in Copenhagen, Denmark. ICES "coordinates and promotes marine research in the North Atlantic" with the help and expertise of more than 1600 scientists from its twenty member countries ("About us - What do we do?").\[1\] ICES uses its research to create cohesive marine management plans for its members.
Vision and Goals
The ICES vision is to develop "an international scientific community that is relevant, responsive, sound, and credible concerning marine ecosystems and their relation to humanity." The organization hopes to achieve the vision by advancing "the scientific capacity to give advice on human activities affecting, and affected by, marine ecosystems" (The ICES Strategic Plan, 2002). Specifically, ICES has defined ten major goals in its Strategic Plan:
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After selecting a management plan for each stock, scientists examine the effects of stock interaction and adjust their models accordingly. In the final phase, the effects of the management plan on the ecosystem are examined. Because this portion of the review is new, concrete standards have not been defined, and ways to quantify impacts on the ecosystem are still being researched. If findings show that the health of the ecosystem warrants special restrictions, however, those restrictions are incorporated into the management plan (ICES, 2006).
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[1\] Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America are members of ICES. Australia, Chile, Greece, New Zealand, Peru, and South Africa are affiliate countries.
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Current State of Fish Tracking
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Today, both scientists and commercial fishermen track fish. While both use sonar for biomass both use sonar for biomass estimates, fishermen use the estimates to "catch fish more effectively, while scientists use \ [the data\] to study fish distribution and estimate stock distribution and estimate stock abundance" (ICES, 2006). Scientists also use larger-scale methods to survey fish scale methods to survey fish populations, such as trawl surveys and tagging projects.
Trawl Surveys
Trawl surveys are large-scale research efforts that can provide scientists with data on the types of fish, numbers of fish, and characteristics of fish in a given region. They have immense value; NOAA trawl surveys, for example, yield information for nearly 200 species (NOAA).
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UN-OCEANS is a site that presents the history, mission, and partners of the UN-OCEANS program
http://www.oceansatlas.org/www.un-oceans.org/About.htm#Participation.unmigrated-wiki-markup
Worm, B., Barbier, E.B., Beaumont, N., Duffy, J.E., Folke, C., Halpern, B.S., Jackson, J.B.C., Lotze, H.K., Micheli, F., Palumbi, S.R., Sala, E., Selkoe, K.A., Stachowicz, J.J., Watson, R. (3 November 2006). Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services. Science Magazine, 314, 787-790. Retrieved 19 October 2007, from the World Wide Web:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5800/787\[\]
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. (2007). The CITES Appendices. Retrieved November 19, 2007, from http://www.cites.org/eng/app/index.shtml.
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