On Wednesday night, the White House announced that it is expanding an existing marine monument around seven U.S.-controlled islands and atolls in the central Pacific, making it the largest protected area of any kind on the planet.

The historic announcement extends protection to endangered wildlife and serves as a powerful symbol of commitment to marine conservation, says one leading ocean scientist and advocate.

Elliott Norse, the founder and chief scientist of the Seattle-based Marine Conservation Institute, has spent the past decade working on marine protected areas in the Pacific. In addition to his scientific and advocacy work on the newly expanded Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, Norse also worked to establish the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument.

National Geographic discussed the importance of these protected areas with Norse.

Why is it important to expand the Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Monument from its current state?

There are two answers to that question. One of them is a conservation/science answer and one of them is politics. An answer to the former is that existing protections are not enough to maintain the abundance of marine life we are concerned about.

We originally made the case that the Bush administration should create the monument out to the exclusive economic zone around the islands, 200 miles. They weren't able to do it because of politics. But it is important because there are organisms that drive processes in these ecosystems that are being killed in large numbers.

Take tunas, which are being fished in the area. It turns out that tunas are really important to seabirds that nest and feed their chicks on the islands. Many of those birds feed well past the boundaries that Bush originally established, and we have to protect the places where they feed.

That's because many of these seabirds can't go very deep in the ocean, so they pick up things from the surface. The problem is many of the fish and squid they eat can go deep. But tunas drive those prey species up to the surface as they feed, where some of them can be caught by birds. So tunas are an essential part of the biology of these island-nesting seabirds.

And what's the political reason for the monument's expansion?

Read more from the original source:

Q&A: Why It's Important to Protect a Vast Marine Monument