Ocean Survey 20/20
20 July 2006
The vision of Ocean Survey 20/20 is to complete by 2020 an ocean survey that will provide New Zealand with the knowledge of its ocean territory:
- to demonstrate our stewardship and exercise our sovereign rights
- to conserve, protect, manage and sustainably utilise our ocean resources, and
- to facilitate safe navigation and enjoyment of the oceans around New Zealand.
The geographic area covered by the programme is primarily New Zealand's EEZ, continental shelf and the Ross Sea region.
Advances in technology now provide the means to bring together a wealth and diversity of data, that will help to build the more complete picture that is needed. New data can be combined in ways that were not imagined even a few years ago. Increasingly sophisticated equipment is available on our vessels, and greater volumes of satellite data are becoming available.
Ocean Survey 20/20 will be looking at the subsurface, seafloor, water column and atmosphere. The range of information collected will be relevant for minerals exploration, fisheries, maritime safety, oceanographic science (including geological hazards), environmental protection, conservation, resource management, recreation and tourism.
Through Ocean Survey 20/20 our objectives are:
- to identify the information priorities
- to ensure that a coordinated approach to acquiring the priority information is taken by all the government agencies involved, and
- to ensure that the information is accessible.
OS 20/20 Work Programme
The OS 20/20 work programme was developed collaboratively by officials from the Environment, Fisheries and Economic Development ministries, Department of Conservation, Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, the Defence Force, relevant Crown Research Institutes, the university sector and regional councils. Land Information New Zealand is the project's coordinating agency.
Proposed projects in the OS20/20 work programme support nine key themes:
- sovereignty
- coastal stewardship and management
- natural hazards and risk management
- maritime safety and security
- fisheries
- biodiversity and ecosystems
- hydrocarbons
- minerals and other physical resources
- climate
Objectives established for the information gathered under these themes are:
Sovereignty
- To complete the delineation of New Zealand's continental shelf (completed in April 2006).
- To respond to international obligations and major UN or Antarctic Treaty member initiatives related to oceans.
Coastal Management and Stewardship
- To define tidal boundaries that are consistent, provable, and publishable.
- To provide fundamental data about the seabed out to 12 nm which allows the Regional Councils and central government agencies to understand the nature of their jurisdictions plan their management have contextual data for resource consent matters.
- To understand the biodiversity of coastal areas which may bear impacts of development, commercial use and recreation.
- To record the biodiversity of areas of known unique characteristics or where community value is strong.
- To understand the contribution of coastal environments to fishing productivity.
- To understand the impacts of fishing on coastal biodiversity.
- To facilitate the development and management of aquaculture.
- To understand the extent of extractable resources in coastal areas and to have data which would allow an assessment of the physical impacts of their extraction.
- To provide data for input to tsunami propagation models in coastal areas where high property and life losses might occur in a tsunami.
Natural Hazards and Risk Management
- To document submarine geological hazard sources in known high risk areas.
- To provide data that supports measures to mitigate terrestrial effects of hazard events in the submarine environment.
Maritime Safety and Security
- To collect hydrographic data adequate for the maintenance and improvement of official nautical charts for all areas where the depth of water is less than 200 m.
- To improve the safety of navigation in the 12 nautical mile areas around New Zealand's offshore islands.
- To provide information/data in support of freedom to manoeuvre for Navy and other agency patrol vessels and for search and rescue.
Fisheries
- To demonstrate the distribution of fishing disturbance.
- To compare and contrast adjacent areas that are relatively unfished and heavily fished.
- To understand patchiness and scale of different benthic habitats and their associated fauna.
- To ground-truth selected aspects of the Marine Environment Classification.
Biodiversity and Ecosystems
To link biodiversity and community structure in representative areas to habitat and environmental characteristics so that:
- risks to and opportunities from biodiversity can be identified, and policy tools applied or developed appropriately to reduce or prevent loss and further decline.
- a baseline is established for monitoring environmental change.
- the Marine Environment Classification can be interpreted in terms of the biodiversity that exists within environments.
Hydrocarbons
- To promote the exploration and support the management of hydrocarbon resources by surveying all known sedimentary basins shallower than 2000 m.
Minerals and Other Physical Resources
- To promote exploration for offshore minerals and support the management of the resources by surveying areas at less than 200 metres depth with known mineral potential around the New Zealand mainland coastline (coastal strategy) down to 2000 metres with known mineral deposits.
Climate
- To allow increasingly accurate predictions over 20 years about terrestrial climate, and climate change impacts on New Zealand ocean productivity.
- To provide greater understanding of the contribution the New Zealand ocean makes to the global climate.
