This policy brief is part of the Nereus Scientific & Technical Briefs on Marine Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) series. The briefs are products of a workshop held prior to the 4th International Marine Conservation Congress in St. John’s, Newfoundland (July-August 2016). These briefs were prepared for the second meeting of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Prep Com, held from August 26 – September 9, at the UN.

The series includes policy briefs on 1) Area-based management tools, 2) Climate changein oceans beyond national jurisdictions, 3) Open data, 4) Tech transfer, 5) AIS data as a tool to monitor ABMTs and identify governance gaps in ABNJ fisheries, and 6) Impacts of fisheries on open-ocean ecosystems.

These briefs were organised by Daniel Dunn, Nereus Program Senior Fellow & research scientist in the Duke University Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab. Please contact daniel.dunn at duke.edu for any further inquiries. The workshop and coordination of the briefs was supported by the Nippon Foundation-Nereus Program. All briefs are the product of the specified authors, not the organiser or Nereus. We thank them for their incredible generosity with their time and effort to inform this important process.