Ecologically or Biologically Significant Marine Areas (EBSAs)

CBD-recognized areas of the global ocean of special ecological or biological importance, described through the Convention on Biological Diversity's regional workshop process.

• Bucket / dataset: s3://public-high-seas/ → ebsa
• Source: Global EBSAs shapefile from the CBD/UNEP-WCMC EBSA process (provided by collaborators; raw/Global_EBSAs.zip). Authoritative descriptions: https://www.cbd.int/ebsa/

⚠️ Coverage is INCOMPLETE — read before using

This layer contains 203 EBSAs from 9 of the ~15 CBD regional workshops:

Arctic · North Pacific · South Pacific · Southern Indian Ocean · Wider Caribbean & Western Mid-Atlantic · South East Atlantic · Eastern Tropical & Temperate Pacific · Mediterranean · North West Atlantic

It does not include the North-East Atlantic, Baltic Sea, Black Sea & Caspian Sea, Seas of East Asia, or North Indian Ocean workshops. The full CBD repository describes ~338 areas.

The absence of an EBSA from this layer does not mean none was described for that region. Any analysis or app surfacing this data MUST warn users that queries overlapping an un-covered region (especially the NE Atlantic, Baltic, Black/Caspian Seas, East Asian seas, and North Indian Ocean) are unreliable.

EBSA criteria

Each EBSA carries the seven CBD scientific criteria as ratings — H (High), M (Medium), L (Low), x (not assessed): Crit_Uniqueness (uniqueness or rarity), Crit_LifeHistory (importance for life-history stages), Crit_Threatened (importance for threatened/endangered species & habitats), Crit_Fragility (vulnerability, fragility, sensitivity, slow recovery), Crit_Productivity (biological productivity), Crit_Diversity (biological diversity), Crit_Naturalness (naturalness).

Assets

MapLibre GL JS

DuckDB

Worked example — seamounts in the Sargasso Sea EBSA

Counting seamounts (seafloor-geomorphology) inside the Sargasso Sea EBSA (GLOBAL_ID = 'WC_13'), via the H3 hex layers (join on h0 + h6):

A direct geometry intersection on the GeoParquet gives the same answer.

Notes on the data

• Area: Area_sqKm_EBSA is an equal-area (Mollweide) area in km² — use it directly. (An earlier build sourced the area from a Web-Mercator service and was grossly inflated; this build replaces it with the correct equal-area value.)
• Geometry: all 203 polygons are valid (repaired with ST_MakeValid during source prep). ~10 features are circumpolar / cross the antimeridian.

Processing

cng-datasets workflow: source shapefile → cleaned WGS84 GeoJSON (field rename + MakeValid) → DuckDB-native GeoParquet → PMTiles (maxzoom 10) + H3 hex (resolution 8, parents 7/6/5/0) → repartition by h0.