Standing over 400 metres tall, the Desertas Islands cut through cobalt blues of the North Atlantic’s sky and sea. Waves crash against rusty, dark-brown, craggy cliffs. It would be hard to tell from the starkness of this landscape, but this island used to be topped with fertile volcanic soil, dragon trees, Desertas wolf spider and endemic seabirds like Desertas Petrels.

That was until Madeiran landowners and labourers began to eye up the Desertas Islands in the 15th century as a future settlement. Upon their arrival, and as was customary at the time, these explorers released goats and rabbits, ready to get to work farming this fresh patch of land. But without a fresh water source, the islanders abandoned their plans, left the goats and rabbits to run feral, and returned to a life on the Madeira island catching their keep as fishermen.

Fishing has dominated the local economy on Madeira for decades, but today that maritime economy is changing slightly. That shift is embodied by the Santa Maria Manuela: once a historic cod fishing vessel, now the central hub of a new scientific mission set to lay the course for future marine protections in this diverse archipelago.

It’s the largest marine scientific campaign ever conducted in the region. Over 200 people from 40 organisations will spend a month mapping, tracing, counting, and understanding the ecosystems across Madeira’s archipelago – Madeira, the Desertas Islands and Porto Santo. With the 2030 deadline for 30 per cent marine protections looming, the expedition leaders, scientists and researchers are acutely aware of what stands to be gained, or lost.

 A new generation of ocean protection

This archipelago is connected underneath the water, forming a deep, volcanic underwater mountain range. Swim just 200 metres away from Madeira, and that underwater rockface will steeply fall away and drop directly to the Atlantic Ocean floor – it’s one of the reasons why if you stroll along the seafront restaurants here you’ll see the deep-sea black scabbard fish gracing many a menu. This dramatic seascape also acts as a corridor for migratory species like tuna, short-finned pilot whales, sperm whales, the elusive deep-diving Blainville’s beaked whale, the endangered monk seal, and globally endangered seabirds like the Zino’s Petrel, the Desertas Petrel and the Cory’s Shearwater.

Despite this wealth of diversity, conservation here in Madeira about 30 years ago was still in its infancy. In the early 2000s MARE-Madeira, the non-profit marine research and technology innovator, existed just as a Facebook page, and while the Desertas had been a protected nature reserve since 1990, their surrounding waters had yet to receive the full and partial protections in place today.

On the island, the ecosystem was suffering. By 1990, the early settlers’ goats and rabbits had torn through the plant cover on the islands and eroded the soil; the nests of endemic birds were collapsing and, faced with increasing pressure from local fishers, the monk seal population stood at just eight.

Biologist Paulo Oliveira is one of the leading figures in Portuguese conservation. Having arrived in Madeira in 1988 and immediately joining the public body in charge of managing its local wildlife, the IFCN (Instituto das Florestas e Conservação da Natureza), he decided he wanted to begin to protect and restore the area. Initially, his plans were met with tough local opposition. Over time, however, he managed to establish protections for the waters surrounding the Desertas Islands: half under full protection, and half under partial protection. And over the years, those protections began to work: endemic seabird populations blossomed and monk seal populations began to rebound, going from numbering just eight to over 30.

Increasingly, the government has recognised the value of protecting its local ecosystem: in 2025 Madeira officially incorporated tourism and the environment under the same government position – the Regional Secretariat of Tourism, Environment and Culture. And today, the politician who holds this post, António Eduardo de Freitas Jesus, is backing the Madeira Ocean expedition to establish a new generation of ocean protection in these local waters.

Protecting the right places

“There’s a real ocean exploration, ocean adventure feeling here. And I’m thriving on that,” says Paul Rose, the expedition leader of Pristine Seas – a global conservation project working to achieve that 30×30 goal.

It’s a keen observation. Conservation can often be looked on with a sense of disdain; technical people pointing out the problems, putting the brakes on projects and red tape on industry. On board the Santa Maria Manuela however, there is an impassioned dynamism to the people busying themselves with prep for the month-long mission ahead.

“We are using techniques and methodologies in this expedition that were never used before in these islands,” Oliveira explains.

The mission is one of serious ambition: over the course of 28 days, scientists need to understand how the last 30 years of conservation has worked in this volcanic archipelago, and to gauge which parts are most biodiverse, and therefore the most vital to protect in future.

“We don’t need to protect the whole ocean,” says Guilherme Bismarck, the scientific expeditions management and operations lead at the Oceano Azul Foundation – a critical partner in this mission.

“If we protect these key areas in these key spaces, whatever’s growing, breeding and hatching there, will continue to do so and spill over to the rest of the area. So the surrounding areas will benefit much more from having a small space that is protected, which will have a big impact overall,” he explains.

With the flagship boat the Santa Maria Manuela acting as the scientific base, small, zippy RIB boats are lowered into the water throughout the day, each carrying a different team of scientists gathering data to feed back to the headquarters.

While one team drops baited underwater video cameras into the waters to assess the difference between the Desertas’ partially and fully protected zones, another is filtering thousands of litres of water for eDNA sampling to look for species the cameras might have missed. Further inshore, an intertidal team is measuring rock temperatures and water salinity to study the effects of heat on marine organisms.

From time to time, on the deck of the Santa Maria Manuela, you can spot a catamaran whizzing in between remote underwater camera drop points, or manta trawling the ocean for microplastics while two surveyors sit on the cabin top scanning the skies and seas as they survey for seabirds and cetaceans.

Emmanuel Gonçalves, the Chief Scientist and a member of the board of Oceano Azul Foundation, explains this mission will collate all existing data about the Madeiran ecosystems to understand where the priority areas would be for the creation, expansion or improvement of existing marine protections.

“We are trying to contribute and to push this 30 by 30 agenda, which is very important. Not only to us, it’s about the world,” says Dr João Canning-Clode, a marine ecologist, founder and director of MARE-Madeira, one of the organisations spearheading this expedition.

A seat at the table

Jennifer Caselle, a research biologist in the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara, knows all too well how important community buy-in is to the success of these conservation zones – and the tricky road to be traversed when negotiating marine protections that work for everyone.

“MPAs have to have buy-in from the people that they affect and the people that live near them. And that can’t be after they have been put in place. Because top-down approaches really don’t work that well,” she explains.

In the early 2000s, Caselle worked on establishing one of the world’s most successful MPA networks: California’s underwater parks. The network covers a huge 2,197 square kilometres, about 16 per cent of the state’s waters.

California’s marine parks were established between 2007 and 2012 but, Caselle points out, it took around 11 years of heated and often ugly discussions to establish a compromise that allowed these parks to exist. These tensions tended to come to a head most acutely in discussion with local recreational fishermen.

People in the US viewed the ocean as a commons, Caselle explains. Denying local anglers the right to fish by restricting their access in marine protected areas denied them their fundamental right to their environment.

“They opposed, so badly that we had to have armed wardens in many of these meetings,” she recalls. “I can’t tell you how many times I had to be walked back to my car by an armed guard.”

But, as Caselle shows an image of a group of anglers smiling brightly and holding up a hefty-looking fish, it’s clear that tensions surrounding restrictions of the commons have eased. This is, in part, thanks to a local volunteer citizen science programme which takes anglers out to MPAs to fish.

“It’s been really important to do citizen science – not with the people who are already the fans, but the people who aren’t fans, and get to them onboard however you can,” Caselle explains.

The story echoes Oliveira’s own recollection of attitude changes within his work in conservation. As we sit on the bobbing deck of the Santa Maria Manuela, with the Desertas islands looking over us on our left, Oliveira traces the shifts in mentalities over the course of his career here.

When he started the monk seal conservation project some 36 years ago, people on the island did not take kindly to the restrictive measures put in place.

“I would go to a bar, and they would say: ‘You want to kill me and my family. You’re taking my food and you are protecting those stupid monk seals’,” he recalls.

Then in the summer of 2026, when a monk seal was found injured in the local fishing harbour, the fishermen immediately called on him to come and help save the animal.

“I arrived one hour after being called up. When I arrived, the fishermen were very unhappy with me. They were saying: ‘Why did you take so long? Are you a stupid guy?’” he says.

“In my mind I went back 36 years ago, I said to myself: ‘Is this really happening?’ They wanted to kill me because I wanted to protect the monk seal. I come to save the monk seal, arrive a little later and they are upset,” he goes on.

That altercation, Oliveira tells me, is when he truly realised things were heading in the right direction.

“We are changing mentalities, that is what we have to do,” he says.

Politics in protection

Oliveira, however, is also all too aware of how environmental issues can mutate, mix and be injected with political direction.

The goats, for instance, which continue to roam and decimate local wildlife on the Desertas Islands, became something of a political lightning rod in 2018–2019. The IFCN used to run an eradication programme for feral goats. When local media caught the cull on camera, however, fierce protests erupted, driven by pushback from animal rights groups like PAN-Madeira and Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). In response to such pushback, the cull ended.

“The population is exploding,” explains Oliveira. “That is bad for them [the goats] because they don’t have what they like to eat, they die, they starve.”

It is detrimental too to the wildlife on the islands, threatening the nests of endemic seabirds like the Desertas Petrel. Even though Oliveira has taken campaigners to the island and shown them the damage being caused by the goats, the issue has remained a stubborn point of political contention.

With the 2030 deadline looming, it’s clear that this project doesn’t have time for politically charged issues to make their way into the protection plans.

“We are on a race against time because we know that if we lose the natural values that exist, they will not come back and we also know that all these stresses in the ocean are coming more and more to our attention,” explains Caselle.

“It is in me”

Head of tourism and the environment in Madeira, António Eduardo de Freitas Jesus tells me that the challenge that lies ahead at the moment is changing the conscience of the people, and getting local communities on board with the protection of their rich coastlines.

Fishermen have worked this coast since the 15th century, when goats were first turned loose on the Desertas. The Santa Maria Manuela will spend 28 days in these waters, but local fishing boats work them 12 to 16 hours a day, for three to four weeks at a stretch.

“There’s no way we can protect the ocean without the help of fishermen,” Bismarck tells me aboard the catamaran.

Well-designed MPAs should benefit the areas outside their borders through the “spillover effect”: where fish inside the protected area grow bigger and produce disproportionately more eggs and larvae. These then migrate over their boundary, meaning larger catches for nearby fishers. But Caselle is also clear that ultimately establishing protections means access to the ocean will change for local communities.

“They [MPAs] are places where some fishermen may be being displaced,” says Caselle. “We have to be honest about that, right? It’s not a panacea, and that’s why I think it’s really important to get back to everybody having a seat at the table.”

In this mission, that metaphorical table is somewhere fishermen might be a little more comfortable: a working tuna fish boat. There scientists and local fishermen will work together to understand their local deep-sea ecosystem.

A previous expedition which worked to explore and map the Seine seamount, an underwater mountain roughly 100 nautical miles towards Lisbon, took a similar tack. Without a boat in the area, MARE-Madeira’s researchers teamed up with a local eight-strong crew of tuna fishermen to deploy hydrophones and camera traps far below the surface to survey the little-known ecosystem.

“This was great to engage with the fishermen,” Dr Canning-Clode reflects. “It’s bi-directional. It was very good for us to learn about their challenges, their hard life. But it was important for them to see what we do. They could see in our cameras the fish they are trying to capture in the water alive.”

It is important, Bismarck tells me, for scientists to understand fishermen’s day-to-day life, to see what their needs are, what they see and how they perceive the ecosystem.

One scientist on board the Santa Maria Manuela recalled the interesting parallels between the vocabulary each respective team had for the species they were identifying on the screen: while researchers were more well-versed in the Latin names, Portuguese fishers had developed their own vocabulary to identify each species.

“They were very positive, very supportive and they were like a team of scientists on board,” João adds.

The initiative is also for the fishermen to see how researchers operate off their shores.

“They can see that we are not here to forbid them from fishing, we are here to create a better and more efficient socio-economic system,” Bismarck explains.

If, then, the symbolism of using a historic cod fishing vessel for this mission signals a shift from an extractive economy to something more protection-focused, the use of a tuna vessel could indicate a desire to create something more collaborative; a future in which fishers are brought into the fold of ocean protection, and that recognises how critical those voices are.

But another part of this mission seems to centre on cultivating a love for these local ecosystems and volcanic islands – one which so clearly shapes, spurs on, and supports Canning-Clode and Oliveira’s continued efforts to conserve these ecosystems: a personal attachment and deep respect for this volcanic archipelago.

It’s a love that, Oliveira admits, is difficult to put into words. “I just love what I do,” he says. “I love the feeling. I love the feeling of doing something important for nature, important for the planet. We are working locally, but we are working for the planet. That is something that is really rewarding.

“But it’s also much more than that. I’m emotionally involved with these islands. I grew up here professionally. I got old here. The first time I came here was in 1988. I love small islands. I love the sound of the sea, the sound of the birds at night, the stars. It is in me. Sometimes you have a connection to a place that you can’t put your finger on. It’s peaceful. It’s my yoga.”

Oliveira’s bond with and understanding of these islands and the seas that surround them was forged through years of day-in-day-out work to push forward protections for these ecosystems – despite the perils it might have put him in. This expedition is now trying to bring that sea literacy, connection and passion to the next generation.

On my final day on the boat, 700 students are getting a tour around this historic fishing vessel, gaining an insight into their country’s history, and meeting the scientists who are bringing to life the research going on beyond the horizon, and bringing to life the island’s next chapter.

“Essentially we are building the next generation of knowledge,” Emmanuel says.

As I step off the boat, hearing the excited chatter of children learning about creatures that live just off their shores, there’s a tangible sense of how that next generation of knowledge might evolve, but also who stands to benefit from the protections this expedition is pushing for today.

At current rates, 30 per cent of the ocean is anticipated to be protected by 2289. But as Dr Canning-Clode reflects on the bounds of progress made in Madeira over the last 30 years, he feels optimistic about the 2030 target here. Plus, he says with a smile: “Portuguese people are very good at working with deadlines.”