The governance framework can then be used to encompass ecological and economic valuation for communication and management decisions thus giving a sustainable management framework.

“
“In response to the increasing human impact on our oceans (Pew Oceans Commission, 2003, Ban and Alder, 2008, Halpern et al., 2008, Claudet and Fraschetti, 2010 and Lotze, 2010), legislation has been implemented world-wide to protect, conserve or enhance marine ecosystems, proposing integrative tools and methods to assess ecological integrity and marine health status (Borja et al., 2008). The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS, 1982) is the international basic legal framework that governs the use of the oceans and seas, establishing an international check details obligation to protect and use the resources of the marine environment sustainably; it is further supported by the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 2000). At a national selleck or regional level, several initiatives have been developed (for details, see Borja et al., 2008), such as: (i) Oceans Policy, in Australia; (ii) Oceans Act and Oceans Strategy, in Canada; (iii)

Oceans Act, in the USA; (iv) the Water Framework Directive (WFD, 2000/60/EC), and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD, 2008/56/EC), in Europe; (v) the National Water Act, in South Africa; and (vi) several laws on water and ocean quality, in the People’s Republic of China. These initiatives try to make sustainable use of the seas compatible with the conservation of marine ecosystems and the maintenance of a good status for marine waters, habitats and resources. Status is assessed in an integrative way including measurement SPTLC1 of many components of the ecosystem together with physico-chemical parameters and elements of pollution. This approach is intended to provide an ‘ecosystem-based management’

of marine waters (Apitz et al., 2006, Barnes and McFadden, 2008 and Lester et al., 2010). This concept takes into account the structure, function and processes of marine ecosystems bringing together natural physical, chemical, physiographic, geographic and climatic factors, and integrating them with anthropogenic impacts and activities in the area concerned (Borja et al., 2008). To undertake such an assessment, the above-mentioned marine legislation requires adequate and rigorous monitoring at different spatial and temporal scales. Despite the importance of monitoring, in terms of non-compliance with a threshold and the subsequent need for (expensive) policy and managerial actions, the current global economic crisis, and especially cuts in government spending, are leading many countries (and industries) to try and save on their monitoring budgets (Borja and Elliott, 2013). This has added further motivation for investigating new, more cost-effective methods to monitor and assess marine waters (Frolov et al.