| Abstract |
Although since the end of the 19th century, numerous oceanographic campaigns have traveled the coasts of northwest Africa, the Gulf of Guinea and Namibia, even venturing to the waters of the Indian Ocean, and thousands of publications have described and cited the fish and invertebrates collected Due to those mythical expeditions, the benthic ecosystems that occupy the African continental shelves and margins are among the most unknown and least studied habitats on the planet.
Some of the most productive areas are located on the coasts of Africa and some of the most important fisheries in the world's oceans are developed. For this reason, most of the research that has been carried out historically in the region has focused on the study of species and resources of commercial interest, such as fish, crustaceans and cephalopods.
However, the research of the last decade has clearly shown that we are currently witnessing a degradation of ecosystems due to overfishing that leads to an irreversible loss of marine biodiversity. The depletion of the shelf's traditional resources is driving fishing fleets into deep waters, alarmingly threatening the integrity of some of the most vulnerable ecosystems on the continental margins, including coral reefs. cold, sponge fields, gorgonian forests and seamounts.
Cold-water coral reefs are among the most vulnerable ecosystems on the continental margins, severely threatened by trawling and the extraction of gas and oil from the seabed.
The growing global concern for the conservation of the biodiversity of the seas has found an echo in the United Nations and other international organizations, which have begun to deploy a strong activity aimed at promoting the protection of ecosystems and the regulation of trawling in the continental margins, both under national jurisdiction and in free waters. Thus, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) issued, already in 2007, a resolution in which it exhorts states to adopt and apply measures to identify and protect their marine ecosystems, improving scientific research and transboundary cooperation, further encouraging them to apply the ecosystem-based approach to the management and management of their fisheries.
Knowledge of benthos is therefore essential when it comes to approaching the exercise of responsible fishing, the lasting management of living resources and the protection of the seas based on a holistic approach.
The EcoAfrik Project, which launched the Spanish Institute of Oceanography in 2009, with the collaboration of the Faculty of Marine Sciences of the University of Vigo, aims to address this general lack of knowledge about the biodiversity and benthic ecosystems of Africa.
The project is based on the study and identification of the collections of benthic invertebrates and on the analysis of the data collected in 2,147 trawling stations carried out throughout the 24 campaigns carried out by the oceanographic vessels' Vizconde de Eza 'and' Dr. Fridtjof Nansen 'developed on the African Atlantic and Indian Ocean platforms and slopes between 2002 and 2012.
In all these campaigns, the same sampling methodology was used, important reference faunal collections and quantitative data were collected, not only from commercial species of crustaceans and cephalopods, but from all benthic invertebrates. Most of these campaigns have had a multidisciplinary approach since, in addition to the specific sampling of the benthos, bathymetric surveys of the seabed have been carried out with multi-beam echo sounder equipment and obtained sediment samples and oceanographic data that will provide information on environmental conditions.
Between 2002 and 2010, the Spanish Institute of Oceanography carried out 21 research campaigns on the Atlantic and Indic coasts of Africa, commissioned by the General Secretariat of the Sea (SGM) of the Ministry of the Environment, Rural and Marine, responding to the commitments politicians that it maintains with their counterparts from the countries of the region.
In general, the main objective of most of these campaigns has been the fisheries assessment and the prospecting of possible new resources, particularly in deep waters. However, all the campaigns have had a markedly multidisciplinary character, since other specific ones were added to the main objective in each one of them in order to expand the knowledge that to date was had about ecosystems and environmental conditions in the different study areas.
Some specific campaigns, such as those carried out in the Walvis Ridge and in the Mozambique Channel, had the sole objective of studying the benthic ecosystems and vulnerable habitats present in their seabeds, while others such as those in Mauritania changed their initial fishing objective. and focusing on the characterization of the ecosystems discovered along them.
All the campaigns have been carried out within the framework of the IEO's cooperation with the fisheries and oceanographic research institutes of the respective countries, the participating teams being made up of scientific personnel belonging to Program 03 (CECAF-AFRICA) of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography and corresponding African research centers. Since 2004, the benthos specialists from Professor Ramil's team from the Faculty of Marine Sciences of the University of Vigo have participated on board in all the campaigns. The 21 campaigns had as their platform the Spanish oceanographic vessel Vizconde de Eza, belonging to the General Secretariat of the Sea.
In total, information is available on 1543 towing stations, in addition to…. vertical profiles with oceanographic sensors,… .. plankton trawls and more than… .. nautical miles have been covered with multibeam echosounder. More recently, in 2011 and 2012, FAO, within the framework of the Project for the protection of the Great Marine Ecosystem of the Canary Current (CCLME), has carried out two ecosystem campaigns in the Northwest African region and another in the archipelago from Cape Verde, in which the ECOAFRIK team has participated as responsible for the study of benthos. |