 The Sufra Marine Management Association in the year 2000 was gazetted as the local fisheries management agency designated to manage the Sufra Marine Management Area. In order to improve the capacity, the Department of Fisheries and the Sufra Marine Management Association have joined forces to map out the boundaries of the marine reserves, zones and other areas within the Canaries Ancillary Marine Management Area and the Sufra Marine Management Area. According to Chief Fisheries Officer Serita Williams-Peter, the initiative is a critical component in ensuring the effective and efficient management of fisheries as the agencies will be better equipped to avoid and resolve conflict between resource users in the area while also protecting marine life. The department recognizes that over the years since it's gazetted in the year 2000, what has happened is that there was a lot of institutional memory lost of course in terms of the zones. There are yacht marine areas, there are recreational areas, there are marine reserves and there are fishing priority areas and all of these areas have particular types of rules and regulations governing what can happen in those areas. Now very critical to that is people need to know where those boundaries are and what has happened is that we have relied more or less on institutional memory, land marks to be able to indicate that but as we move towards enforcing those areas better and to have a long history or catalogue of it, it's critical that we what we call delimit these areas properly with geo-reference points. The mapping exercise was supported by Nature Conservancy, a global environmental nonprofit organization with the mission of conserving land and waters around the world. Nature Conservancy researcher Steve Schill explains the importance of the mapping exercise in enforcing the fishing laws. It's very difficult to enforce a management area if you don't know where the boundaries exactly are and so my job is to come here and help identify those boundaries. We're using a transducer which we attach to the side of the boat, we're trying to find that 75 meter contour or depth and we're following that, mapping that out because that marks the seaward boundary of the management zone and then we're also trying to find the coordinates where each of the zones begin and start such as where the yachts are mooring, where they're fishing priority areas, where there are recreational areas and where there are marine reserves. So we're mapping those out and trying to get very precise measurements so that that can be given to the government and we have an official gazette of where the marine zones are. The two-day management area mapping exercise began on Tuesday, October 12, 2021 and concluded on Wednesday, October 13, 2021. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, I am Anisia Antoine reporting.