The Elsevier Atlas Advisory Board chooses an award-winning Atlas article from across all Elsevier journal portfolios based on their potential social impact. The paper, led by Qianshuo Zhao and from his PhD work, included PhD student Dinusha Jayalathilake, and used a suite of measures of biodiversity to map the 30% of the ocean with most biodiversity as a guide to where Marine Reserves would be best located. The Award was based on the papers likely benefit to society, particularly the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 which concerns Life below water. More details on the paper and background research are available in English and Chinese. Qianshuo was interviewed about the study.
An online atlas of the top 30% area with the related maps of species richness, realms of endemicity, topographic variation (rugosity), biomes, ecosystems, EEZ, depth and sea temperature is free to use here. For teaching purposes, users can click the ‘?’ icon to get a list of questions that can be answered from the maps.
And has been tweeted https://twitter.com/deepseadawn/status/1285777148158939138