The Southern Ocean around Antarctica is one of the fastest changing regions on the planet and an emerging resource frontier for fisheries. Here, we present the Antarctic Ecosystem Value (AEV) Index created by merging ecosystem information across food web trophic levels to quantify the ecological value of marine areas around the Antarctic continent. The AEV Index provides novel future projections indicating that high-value regions might continue to be valuable despite climate changes. We find that coastal polynyas - areas of reduced sea-ice - have AEV Index values about 3 times higher than surrounding areas, suggesting that these areas may remain as biologically valuable hot spots for the Antarctic ecosystem. This study identifies valuable areas inside and outside proposed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). While about 75% of valuable areas are within proposed MPA boundaries, there are several opportunities for adopting additional protection, particularly in East Antarctica and the Amundsen Sea.
Below we present this paper in full, which is currently in review with Nature Communications. Preliminary results of this work have also been presented in WG-EMM-2022/40 and SC-CAMLR-43/BG/26. We note that in addition to the peer-reviewed paper, we have been developing two web-based tools that make the paper results more accessible and useable. We intend to present these tools to SC-CAMLR at their annual meeting in October 2025. The first tool is a public facing web-tool being developed in collaboration with OnlyOne. This tool will include maps presenting the results of the Antarctic Ecosystem Value Index, as well as videos, photos, written articles and other media and visuals which help illustrate the results from this project. The second tool is a Shiny app still under development which visualizes and summarizes the distribution and extent of spatial overlap of circumpolar-scale Important Marine Areas for Biodiversity (e.g., Ecologically or Biologically Significant Areas, Important Marine Mammal Areas, Important Shark and Ray Areas, and Key Biodiversity Areas, as well as Areas of Ecological Significance), and existing conversation planning analyses within MPAs and MPA Planning Domains in the Southern Ocean. It includes the primary bioregionalizations that have been developed for the Southern Ocean at a circumpolar scale as well as the AEV Index and other key circumpolar analyses. Specifically, we sought to visualize where these conservation analyses overlap or align in the Southern Ocean to better understand the distribution of biodiversity in the Southern Ocean.