Heather M. Leslie

• PhD
• Professor at University of Maine

Conventional management approaches cannot meet the challenges faced by ocean and coastal ecosystems today. Consequently, national and international bodies have called for a shift toward more comprehensive ecosystem-based marine management. Synthesizing a vast amount of current knowledge, Ecosystem-Based Management for the Oceans is a comprehensive...

Ecological resilience to climate change is a combination of resistance to increasingly frequent and severe disturbances, capacity for recovery and selforganization, and ability to adapt to new conditions. Here, we focus on three broad categories of ecological properties that underlie resilience: diversity, connectivity, and adaptive capacity. Diver...

Significance Meeting human needs while sustaining ecosystems and the benefits they provide is a global challenge. Coastal marine systems present a particularly important case, given that >50% of the world’s population lives within 100 km of the coast and fisheries are the primary source of protein for >1 billion people worldwide. Our integrative an...

We explore how marine ecosystem–based management (EBM) is translated from theory to practice at six sites with varying ecological and institutional contexts. Based on these case studies, we report on the goals, strategies, and outcomes of each project and what we can learn from these efforts to guide future implementation and assessment. In particu...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a key tool for achieving goals for biodiversity conservation and human well-being, including improving climate resilience and equitable access to nature. At a national level, they are central components in the U.S. commitment to conserve at least 30% of U.S. waters by 2030. By definition, the primary goal of an MPA...

Coastal marine social–ecological systems are experiencing rapid change. Yet, many coastal communities are challenged by incomplete data to inform collaborative research and stewardship. We investigated the role of participatory mapping of local knowledge in addressing these challenges. We used participatory mapping and semi-structured interviews to...

As global change accelerates, natural resource-dependent communities must respond and adapt. Small-scale fisheries, essential for coastal livelihoods and food security, are considered among the most vulnerable of these coupled social-ecological systems. While previous studies have examined vulnerability and adaptation in fisheries at the individual...

Marine ecosystem-based management (EBM) is recognized as the best practice for managing multiple ocean-use sectors, explicitly addressing tradeoffs among them. However, implementation is perceived as challenging and often slow. A poll of over 150 international EBM experts revealed progress, challenges, and solutions in EBM implementation worldwide....

Transdisciplinary collaboration offers great potential for meaningfully addressing complex problems related to climate change and social inequities. Communication shapes transdisciplinary collaboration in myriad ways, and interdisciplinary and rhetorical approaches to communication can help identify these influences as well as strategies to transfo...

As aquaculture production continues to increase worldwide, important questions are emerging about the motivations of growth and who stands to benefit. We use Q method to identify perspectives associated with marine aquaculture development in Maine, where aquaculture expansion in the United States has become a central focus. We used newspaper articl...

Ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) is increasingly recognized as the future of fisheries conservation and stewardship, appearing prominently in policy documents internationally. Although considerable progress has been made to translate EBFM from theory to practice, limited attention has been given to assessing the theoretical and practical...

The ocean provides benefits to coastal communities around the world, however, the depth and complexity of people's interactions with marine ecosystems are not well represented in many marine management initiatives. Many fisheries are managed to maximize provisioning value, which is readily quantified, while ignoring cultural values. An ecosystem se...

Whereas the conservation and management of biodiversity has become a key issue in environmental sciences and policy in general, the conservation of marine biodiversity faces additional challenges such as the challenges of accessing field sites (e.g. polar, deep sea), knowledge gaps regarding biodiversity trends, high mobility of many organisms in f...

Understanding how institutions operate is crucial to the protection of marine ecosystems and the communities that depend on them. We define institutions as the rules, norms, and practices that govern resource users’ interactions with common-pool resources, and recognize that both formal and informal institutions govern marine fisheries around the w...

Most fishing is inherently size‐selective, in that fishers preferentially select a subset of the population for harvest based on economic incentives associated with different‐sized fish. Size‐selective fishing influences the targeted population and fishery performance in multiple ways, including changing the reproductive capacity of the target popu...

Planning for change is critical to ensuring resilient coastal communities. In Maine, USA, the comprehensive planning process provides a platform for communities to articulate policies that address social, economic, and environmental issues. While comprehensive plans were initially required of municipalities to address urban sprawl over thirty years...

Temporal variability driven by environmental shifts, biological processes, and socioeconomic fluctuations is inherent in natural resource-based sectors, including fisheries. In navigating these changes as opportunities for transformation, individual decisions play a key role. Understanding individual adaptive capacity, i.e., the ability to cope und...

Aquaculture represents an increasingly significant share of the global supply of freshwater and marine resources. The distribution of benefits from aquaculture development will largely depend on who has the resources necessary to participate in the sector and how the sector is governed. We investigate the extent to which aquaculture is being utiliz...

Systematic conservation planning (SCP) has increasingly been used to prioritize conservation actions, including the design of new protected areas to achieve conservation objectives. Over the last 10 years, the number of marine SCP studies has increased exponentially, yet there is no structured or reliable way to find information on methods, trends,...

Systematic conservation planning (SCP) has increasingly been used to prioritize conservation actions, including the design of new protected areas to achieve conservation objectives. Over the last 10 years, the number of marine SCP studies has increased exponentially, yet there is no structured or reliable way to find information on methods, trends,...

The US and Mexico share a common history in many areas, including language and culture. They face ecological changes due to the increased frequency and severity of droughts and rising energy demands; trends that entail economic costs for both nations and major implications for human well being. We describe an ongoing effort by the Environment Worki...

In this chapter, I reflect on the core principles that guide my engagement in interdisciplinary conservation science and practice. These include attention and openness when defining the coupled natural and human systems of interest; commitment to doing useful, solutions-oriented scholarship; mindful engagement with collaborators; and humility. In 2...

Maintaining biodiversity is a central tenet of conservation, in part because biodiversity influences ecosystem functions across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems. Biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships have clear relevance for the design of habitat restoration efforts, yet the degree to which biodiversity has been incorporated into...

The coastal forests formed by the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera are iconic and primary habitats distributed discontinuously from central Baja California (Mexico) to central California (USA). The giant kelp creates a biogenic habitat that supports high levels of species diversity and productivity in the region, acting as a refuge, nursery and food...

Small-scale fisheries are an important source of food and livelihoods to coastal communities around the world. Understanding the seasonality of fisheries catch and composition is crucial to fisheries management, particularly in the context of changing environmental and socioeconomic conditions. While seasonal variability directly impacts the lives...

Additional analyses for each fishing office. (PDF)

Temporal trends in ecological resilience indicators at the spatial scale of Baja California Sur. (PDF)

CONAPESCA landings data for Baja California Sur from 2001–2013. (CSV)

Experimental tests of the hypothesis that ecological communities can exist in “multiple stable states” are rare, and some argue, impossible, because of the unlikelihood that any system will meet the necessary criteria. These are that alternative states (1) are in the same location, (2) experience the same environment, (3) persist for multiple gener...

To predict the impacts of climate change, a better understanding is needed of the foundation species that build and maintain biogenic ecosystems. Spartina alterniflora Loisel (smooth cordgrass) is the dominant salt marsh-building plant along the US Atlantic coast. It maintains salt marsh elevation relative to sea level by the accumulation of aboveg...

Each winter, populations of striped bass (Morone saxatilis) migrate north from the coastal mid-Atlantic region of the US to the coastal waters of New England. During this migration, striped bass spend significant time in estuaries and saltmarshes, presumably to forage. However, the extent to which saltmarsh productivity supports striped bass remain...

Devolving property rights to local institutions has emerged as a compelling management strategy for natural resource management in developing countries. The use of property rights among fishing cooperatives operating in Mexico's Gulf of California provides a compelling setting for theoretical and empirical analysis. A dynamic theoretical model demo...

• Salt marshes are highly productive and valuable ecosystems, providing many services on which people depend. Spartina alterniflora Loisel (Poaceae) is a foundation species that builds and maintains salt marshes. Despite this species' importance, much of its basic reproductive biology is not well understood, including flowering phenology, seed prod...

As governments from the local to national level have recognized the need to integrate renewable sources into their energy portfolios, there has been a recent push to harness diverse sources of ocean energy, including those generated by tides and waves. Despite the potential benefits, development of these marine and hydrokinetic (MHK) resources has...

We report on patterns of abundance, recruitment, and predation on the blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) in three human-dominated estuaries in the northeastern United States. Through replicate field experiments and observational studies at multiple sites nested within each of the three estuaries, we investigated the relative influences of local and regio...

An age-old conflict around a seemingly simple question has resurfaced: why do we conserve nature? Contention around this issue has come and gone many times, but in the past several years we believe that it has reappeared as an increasingly acrimonious debate between, in essence, those who argue that nature should be protected for its own sake (intr...

Background / Purpose: This talk focused on emerging results from a international interdisciplinary program that I lead, focused on the social and ecological systems associated with SSF in Baja California Sur, Mexico. The core question guiding this work is how does variation in the marine environment and local institutions influence ecosystem and...

Since the 1990s, there have been seven marine conservation planning efforts in the Gulf of California, at a cost of millions of dollars. How do we evaluate the impacts of these investments? Are marine species and ecosystems in better condition than they would have been otherwise? Scholarship on conservation success is limited, suggesting a need for...

Market demand is often ignored or assumed to lead uniformly to the decline of resources. Yet little is known about how market demand influences natural resources in particular contexts, or the mediating effects of biological or institutional factors. Here, we investigate this problem by examining the Pacific red snapper (Lutjanus peru) fishery arou...

A substantial distance lies between policy-relevant research and research that is used by policymakers and practitioners. Obstacles include the early identification of a shared policy problem, establishment of close relationships between researchers and policymakers, effective and appropriate communication skills for different audiences, and limite...

Environmental shocks may strongly affect fisheries. However, it is not well understood how environmental shocks affect multi-species fisheries at a regional scale or how biological, institutional, and economic factors mediate the effects of environmental shocks on fisheries. ENSO, an important environmental shock, may directly affect fish populatio...

The ocean plays a critical role in supporting human well-being, from providing food, livelihoods and recreational opportunities to regulating the global climate. Sustainable management aimed at maintaining the flow of a broad range of benefits from the ocean requires a comprehensive and quantitative method to measure and monitor the health of coupl...

Background/Question/Methods Consumer pressure plays a major role in structuring many biological communities. However, the relative importance of consumers is context dependent, shifting with environmental factors (e.g. species identity, system productivity) and anthropogenic impacts. We used a manipulative consumer-exclusion experiment to examine...

Background/Question/Methods: Salt marshes are valuable coastal ecosystems, and yet we lack a mechanistic understanding of how these communities will respond to climate change. On the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the salt marsh foundation species Spartina alterniflora (smooth cordgrass) dominates low marsh elevations and some high-elevation pannes...

Background/Question/Methods Building on a tradition of multi-sectoral management in forests and other terrestrial ecosystems, as well as earlier coastal management and sector-specific marine management efforts, the Obama administration codified ecosystem-based management for the coasts and oceans in 2010. The US’s first ever National Ocean Policy...

While there is rich scholarship focused on humans as part of ocean ecosystems, there have been relatively few efforts to put these ideas into practice at larger geographic scales. As the Ocean Health Index (OHI) is focused on the ability of oceans to deliver a range of benefits, it explicitly includes people in the assessment of ocean condition. Ap...

Despite its necessity, integration of natural and social sciences to inform conservation efforts has been difficult. We examined the views of 63 scientists and practitioners involved in marine management in Mexico's Gulf of California, the central California coast, and the western Pacific on the challenges associated with integrating social science...

Two of the priority objectives in the new U.S. National Ocean Policy are “ecosystem-based management” (EBM) and “coastal and marine spatial planning” (CMSP). Drawing from several studies demonstrating these concepts in practice in the United States and elsewhere, we provide recommendations for those engaged in implementing the new policy. We descri...

The contributors highlight tools for implementing the concept of ecosystem services in biodiversity conservation, development, and sustainability efforts.

Variation in physical factors, such as slope, orientation, and wind exposure, shapes thermal conditions. Variation in substrate size is common in many habitats, but its thermal consequences for organisms are not well characterized. Larger substrates should remain more thermally stable and act as thermal refuges for associated organisms during short...

Climate change is predicted to affect coastal marine ecosystems in myriad ways, including ocean warming and acidification, increased variability of storm events, and changes in the distribution of ecologically and commercially important species. The temporal and spatial variability of these impacts, along with the uncertainty of exactly how physica...

Background/Question/Methods Conventional management approaches cannot meet the challenges faced by marine ecosystems today. Consequently, national and international bod­ies have called for movement towards ecosystem-based management (EBM). At its core, EBM is about acknowledging con­nections. EBM focuses on the array of ecosystem services that we...

Background/Question/Methods Summer temperatures can impose lethal stresses on rocky intertidal organisms and are influenced by substrate characteristics such as orientation and slope. Here, we show that rock size plays an even more important role than these other factors in determining rock temperatures and influencing the distribution of intertid...

Key elements of the rapidly expanding field of ecosystem-based management include: (a) understanding connections among social and ecological systems and (b) developing analytical approaches to inform the necessary trade-offs among ecosystem services and human activities in coastal and marine areas. To address these needs, we investigate the impacts...

Managing trade-offs among water uses in a river basin to sustain multiple ecosystem services is crucial for adaptation to changing river flow regimes. Here we analyze the trade-off between irrigation and fisheries in the Amudarya, a semi-arid river basin in Central Asia, using an optimal control and an agent-based modeling approach. With the optima...

Conventional perceptions of the interactions between people and their environment are rapidly transforming. Old paradigms that view humans as separate from nature, natural resources as inexhaustible or endlessly substitutable, and the world as stable, predictable, and in balance are no longer tenable. New conceptual frameworks are rapidly emerging...

Many services provided by coastal and marine ecosystems are in decline. Awareness of these declines and the need to improve existing management has led to a shift toward ecosystem-based approaches to marine management and conservation, both in the US and elsewhere. Marine ecosystem-based management (EBM) involves recognizing and addressing interact...

Many services provided by coastal and marine ecosystems are in decline. Awareness of these declines and the need to improve existing management has led to a shift toward ecosystem-based approaches to marine management and conservation, both in the US and elsewhere. Marine ecosystem-based management (EBM) involves recognizing and addressing interact...

We develop an agent-based model for forest harvesting to study how interactions between neighboring land parcels and the degree of information flow among landowners influence harvesting patterns. We assume a forest is composed of a number of land parcels that are individually managed. Each parcel is either mature forested, just-harvested, or immatu...

Marine resource exploitation can deplete stocks faster than regulatory agencies can respond. Institutions with broad authority and a global perspective are needed to create a system with incentives for conservation.

Overfishing is increasingly threatening the world's marine ecosystems (1, 2). The search for the social causes of this crisis has often focused on inappropriate approaches to governance and lack of incentives for conservation (3, 4). Little attention, however, has been paid to the critical impact of sequential exploitation: the spatially expanding...

In the last decade, there has been increasing interest—particularly among international nongovernmental and multilateral development organizations—in evaluating the effectiveness of conservation and development projects. To evaluate success, we need more comprehensive and case-specific information on how conservation decisions are made. I report on...

High-density aggregations of conspecifics have long been presumed to have negative effects on individual fitness, yet this has not been adequately tested for multiple life history traits in the field. Here I report a series of investigations that comprehensively evaluate the influence of conspecific density on key traits (survival, growth, and repr...

Coastal marine ecosystems provide important ecosystem services to human populations worldwide. Understanding the contexts in which a species has markedly higher reproductive output is vital for effective management and conservation of these valuable and highly impacted systems. We documented reproductive hotspots along the Oregon coast for an ecolo...

Recent experiments, mainly in terrestrial environments, have provided evidence of the functional importance of biodiversity to ecosystem processes and properties. Compared to terrestrial systems, aquatic ecosystems are characterised by greater propagule and material exchange, often steeper physical and chemical gradients, more rapid biological proc...

The structure of ecological communities reflects a tension among forces that alter populations. Marine ecologists previously emphasized control by locally operating forces (predation, competition, and disturbance), but newer studies suggest that inputs from large-scale oceanographically modulated subsidies (nutrients, particulates, and propagules)...

Marine reserves are an emerging management tool, and can serve as examples of the practical application of basic marine ecology. Although some aspects of reserve science are well known, new information is badly needed in at least two major areas: the impact that reserves have on their surrounding ecosystems, and how we can use complex ecological an...

Using ecological criteria as a theoretical framework, we describe the steps involved in designing a network of marine reserves for conservation and fisheries man- agement. Although we describe the case study of the Channel Islands, the approach to marine reserve design may be effective in other regions where traditional management alone does not su...

Marine reserves are being established worldwide in response to a growing recognition of the conservation crisis that is building in the oceans. However, designation of reserves has been largely opportunistic, or protective measures have been implemented (often overlapping and sometimes in conflict) by different entities seeking to achieve different...

Using benthic habitat data from the Florida Keys (USA), we demonstrate how siting algorithms can help identify potential networks of marine reserves that comprehensively represent target habitat types. We applied a flexible optimization tool-simulated annealing-to represent a fixed proportion of different marine habitat types within a geographic ar...

Several schemes have been developed to help select the locations of marine reserves. All of them combine social, economic, and biological criteria, and few offer any guidance as to how to prioritize among the criteria identified. This can imply that the relative weights given to different criteria are unimportant. Where two sites are of equal value...