Table 1.
Application of the scientific criteria adopted for identifying ecologically or biologically significant areas to seamounts ecosystems.
Table 2.
Typology and weight of the indicators used to identify seamount ecologically or biologically significant areas.
Figure 1.
Impact of some anthropogenic activities on seamount ecosystems.
A scoring system for the impact of fishing gears and mining activities on five ecological groups are shown (adapted from [81], [87]). The impacts are defined as: 1, very low; 2, low; 3, medium; 4, high; and 5, very high.
Figure 2.
Seamount EBSA portfolio plot based on EBSA and threat scores randomly assigned to 1000 dummy seamounts.
The different color represents four portfolio categories. Blue area: low EBSA likelihood-low threats exposure. Yellow area: low EBSA likelihood-high threats exposure. Green area: high EBSA likelihood-low threats exposure. Red area: high EBSA likelihood-high threats exposure.
Table 3.
Seamount EBSA likelihood scores for the eight evaluated seamounts.
Table 4.
Threat scores for the evaluated seamounts.
Figure 3.
Seamount EBSA portfolio plot based on EBSA likelihood scores and threat scores for eight case studies.
The different color represents four portfolio categories. Blue area: low EBSA likelihood-low threats exposure. Yellow area: low EBSA likelihood-high threats exposure. Green area: high EBSA likelihood-low threats exposure. Red area: high EBSA likelihood-high threats exposure. Error bars represent the data uncertainty index (see methods) proportional to data availability and quality.
Figure 4.
Components of the seamount ecosystem contributing to the EBSA score and its threat status.
Radar plots for individual seamount showing what parts of the ecosystems (e.g. benthic, benthopelagic or pelagic) are contributing to the EBSA score (yellow area) or being threatened by human activities (red area). The EBSA component is shown as the proportion of attributes present (in a 0 to 5 scale) in each seamount as in Table 3, while the threats is given by the maximum threat estimated for each component of the seamount ecosystem. EBSA/Threat show the final EBSA and Threat score for each seamount.