Nautical Mile Buffer

A nautical-mile buffer is a distance-based protective zone drawn at a fixed radius, measured in nautical miles, around a sensitive feature such as a marine mammal aggregation, a seabird colony, a coral reef, or a vessel-exclusion area. It is a management tool, not a formal legal category: the buffer width is set case by case in marine protected area regulations, seismic-survey mitigation conditions, or whale-watching codes to keep an activity beyond the range of disturbance. Examples include approach limits in whale-watching guidelines and exclusion radii around right-whale concentrations. The chosen distance is justified by the disturbance footprint, for noise the sound-propagation range, rather than by a single standard figure.