Layer representing the area of the Pelagos Sanctuary. On November 25, 1999, the Pelagos Agreement, creating the Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals, was signed in Rome by France, Italy and the Principality of Monaco. Having come into effect on February 21, 2002, the agreement seeks to enable the three countries to create jointly coordinated initiatives to protect cetaceans and their habitats from all sources of disturbance: pollution, noise, accidental capture and injury, disruption etc. Its area includes the coastal waters and pelagic area comprised between the headlands of the Giens peninsula to the Fosso Chiarone in southern Tuscany. It extends across the waters of a number of islands, including Corsica and northern Sardinia as well as smaller islands such as the islands of Hyères, Liguria, the Tuscan Archipelago and the Strait of Bonifacio. It covers an area of 87,500 sq. km and 2,022 km of coast. The geometry was created by CIMA Foundation based on the information published on the official website.
Density of pleasure vessel transits, expressed in kilometres per squared kilometre, within the spatial reference EPSG: 3035 at a 10km spatial resolution and including the INSPIRE compliant cell identifier. Transit distance was calculated from the CIMA foundations AIS dynamic point data which was recorded from an antennae located at 44.30°N and 8.45°E between May 2013 and October 2014. After an initial preparation, cleaning and filtering procedure a GIS platform was used to create line transits from the positional points for each unique vessel for each day. The length of the pleasure vessel transits were then summed within each grid cell for total and monthly composites covering the North West Mediterranean Sea.
Predominant ship speed categories plot on a INSPIRE compliant grid including the cell identifier and using the spatial reference EPSG: 3035 at 5km spatial resolution. Classifications were to 4 speed categories (5-10, 10-15, 15-20 and 20 knots plus) were attributed for each cell according to the speed category with the highest relative vessel density. Vessel density expressed in kilometres per square kilometre were calculated from the CIMA foundations AIS dynamic point data which was recorded from an antennae located at 44.30°N and 8.45°E between May 2013 and October 2014. After an initial preparation, cleaning and speed classification filtering procedure a GIS platform was used to create line transits from the positional points for each unique vessel for each day. The length of the transits for each speed classification of all pleasure, passenger, cargo and tanker vessels were then summed and the grid cell classified to the speed category with the highest density.
