Marine Protected Areas - Science topic

Hola Miguel, soy Natali de Perú y en este momento, Setiembre 2024 tenemos una sobre explotación del recurso "pota" por parte de barcos asiáticos, ante esta situación y respondiendo a tus preguntas podría deducir que, es importante el control y gestión por parte del gobierno, estableciendo leyes claras y monitoreando las zonas afectadas, las especies pueden ser sustentables en el tiempo, a demás, se debe respetar el tiempo de veda prohibiendo y sancionando a quienes lo incumplen.

Es imperativo el cuidado de los recursos marinos no solo por su rol ecológico, sino también, porque son el sustento económico de muchos pescadores artesanales, que, con charlas y convivencias con el personal encargado de las áreas de conservación pueden llegar a comprender que el respeto por la fauna sólo ayuda a crear más vida que por consecuencia los ayuda a generar ingresos.

Finalmente, las prácticas de captura y liberación son francamente inútiles, ya que, la mayoría de veces que un espécimen es devuelto al mar este no se encuentra en condiciones para continuar con normalidad sus actividades y es presa fácil de los depredadores que rondan las zonas de pesca, cumplir con las tallas mínimas en una embarcación que trabaja con arrastre es muy complicado y difícil de gestionar. En mi opinión, se debería realizar un monitoreo constante de la actividad de las embarcaciones observando meticulosamente el GPS para salvaguardar las áreas protegidas, establecer tiempos y parámetros para las condiciones de la veda evitando la captura de juveniles y lo más importante, concientizar a los pescadores, todo empieza con ellos, no podemos verlos como una amenaza, solo tratan de ser el sustento familiar y probablemente llevan en el rubro muchos años, podemos aprender de ellos y trabajar en conjunto para cuidar los mares en todo el mundo.

Espero que mi comentario halla sido de ayuda y que la situación mejore en ambos países,

Saludos.

Looking at your question about geothermal impacts more closely - I am not sure if you are looking specifically at impacts on the marine environment or impact in general. The environmental impact of a geothermal power plant depends on the type of plant being used, Binary power plants use a heat exchanger and the produced geothermal brines are generally all reinjected so there is virtually no interaction between the produced fluids and the environment aside from heat transfer to a secondary fluid to generate steam to drive the turbine. More conventional high temperature flash plants use steam produced from the sub-surface directly to spin the turbines and these fluids can contain things like sulphur and nitrogen compounds that have negative environmental impacts. However, unless a geothermal plant is located adjacent to the coast I would not expect any significant effects on the marine environment, although some could occur.

According to my point of view, first of all, the regulation on fishing inside MPA should be revised. If anyone violates the regulation, they should be punished.

And it is advisable to track the fishing boats with the help of VMS or other reliable tracking devices.

Here's a successful example from the UK

Somehow you need to make adjustments for inconsistencies in methodology or at least discuss this. But spreading sites across ecosystems is good imo because it avoids pseudo-replication :)

Here are recommendations for bottomfish:

Dear Christina

I totally agree with Bashir. To make a somewhat simplistic analysis, there is little or no economic interest in the production of biomass, particularly in fisheries. The economic interest is often reduced to an interest in scuba diving in some site.

Are you referring to Marine Key Biodiversity Area? and Marine Protected Area? They are practically the same. They may differ on the target species or resources to be protected and conserved.  MKBA could be a protected area focused on  an endangered species or a charismatic species with the likes of whale shark, marine turtle, dugongs, etc. An MPA on the other hand, tends to protect and conserve the whole area of reefs, seagrass or mangroves, or interconnected several coastal habitats, usually aiming to improve the conditions of the area, in terms products produced and services delivered.

Gabriel,

The following web site just became available, it's a great source of information on many aspects on MPAs.

Tom

Thanks Mr. Towe!

See link 5 for human effects

They are here, at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292144306_Malacological_notes_on_Chalkidiki_Peninsula_Greece?ev=prf_pub

Which species exactly you are interested?

As I learned from Balicasag Island, Panglao, Bohol, central Philippines, a detailed survey on the number of dives per day was extrapolated into dives/year. The figure was presented to the Panglao Island Executive Committee, a muti-sectoral body for further deliberation.

The body approves the final figure (win-win figure to all parties) then a decision was made to limit the number of dives by pre-booking approach (all tickets printed and distributed to dive resorts). In dive sites, a strict no-ticket, no dive-policy was implemented.

For more inquiries I suggest you contact the provincial government of Bohol or the Japan Intl Cooperation Agency (JICA Expert team) based in Tagbilaran Bohol.

...Abner 

Wolfgang,

You seem to have set three different criteria for the cases you are looking for: mobile species (like some principal gadoids and flatfish), important commercial species, and cold-temperate (plus high-latitude?) species. Those are all different: there are plenty of reef-associated species in cold water and plenty of highly-migratory species in the tropics (such as tunas), while the commercially-important, cold-temperate species include various kinds of scallops, which can do very well in protected areas. However, if you are looking for evidence of local benefits of spatial protections for species that are _simultaneously_ mobile, cold-temperate and commercially-important, then you have narrowed the field quite a bit.

One whole class of success stories is the nursery-area closures. There have been some classic failures, when the boundaries were drawn in the wrong place, but there is no shortage of successes -- not only defining success by higher survival within the closure but also in higher catches when the young fish migrate out as they grow. (Though losses to fishermen targeting other species who get shut out of the nursery closure are generally not included in the measure of "success", when they should be.)

If you are only interested in protections applied to individuals of exploitable sizes and ages, the examples get scarcer. I don't think that there is a convenient summary report but the "Haddock Box" on Western Bank (off Nova Scotia) provides an interesting example, for those willing to dig through assessment documents, survey reports and the like. Whatever success that had was lost, however, with the general collapse of the Atlantic Canadian groundfish fisheries in the early 1990s. (Haddock in Canadian waters have, in any case, shown a major range contraction which has yet to be explained -- or even investigated. That complicates evaluation of any one management measure.)

A better-documented example is likely to be the two large closures to groundfish fishing on Georges Bank that were put into place in 1994 (and which closely followed the boundaries of pre-existing seasonal closures designed to protect pre-spawning aggregations of haddock). I dare say some would argue the point but I think that those closures have materially aided the recovery of haddock. You will find plenty of published comments on them, though I cannot immediately cite a good overall summary paper. 

Outside your immediate interest, but a valuable lesson from the closures on Georges nonetheless: Closing selected areas pushed fishing effort to other parts of Georges and the Gulf of Maine. Naturally enough, with primarily-haddock grounds closed, the areas that saw extra fishing tended to be those more favoured by cod. After 20+ years, the haddock are doing well but the cod are severely depressed. No surprise there. Today, the controls needed to limit cod catches severely constrain the ability of the U.S. groundfish fleet to land the haddock (though the Canadian fleet is catching a lot, which then get trucked down to Boston to supply consumer demand there -- a nice benefit to someone). The situation on the U.S. side of the line is worse than it might have been because, for a decade or so, the existence of the closures allowed the management system to ignore the growth in fleet capacity and the consequent high mortality imposed on some local components of the resources, outside the closures (a sort of negative feed-back effect).

The moral I draw is that, while there is a technical interested in whether one or another species benefits from this or that MPA, within the boundaries of the protected area, effective oceans management needs to consider the regional implications of spatial management measures, as they impact on all of the species that we seek to conserve. It needs to consider those implications in light of other management measures (e.g. effective controls on fishing mortality rates outside the MPAs), particularly other spatial controls, and across the various human interests in the ecosystem (including the non-consumptive ones). That is massively complex. We can skip most of it if there are only a few, small MPAs in a region but, if closures are to be big enough to aid conservation of highly-mobile species, the important questions need to be looked at regionally.

Trevor

I would like to point you to a report we have written recently for the European commission specifically on the topic of connectivity between networks of marine protected areas, called Analysis and comparison of criteria used by Member States for establishing coherent, adequate and representative networks of marine protected areas

look at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277840693_Analysis_and_comparison_of_criteria_used_by_Member_States_for_establishing_coherent_adequate_and_representative_networks_of_marine_protected_areas

There is a lot to be said about the proper configuration of MPAs and taking care of the connectivity between the is highly relevant.

Best regards

Arjen. 

The California Dept of Fish and Game and California Sea Grant held a workshop on managing data-poor fisheries in 2008. Many of the papers presented were published (I think there was a volume in Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science that came out in 2009) and there's been a lot of work subsequently. Alec McCall (retired) and John Field from the SWFSC, among others, contributed significantly to these efforts. The paper by Schroeter et al "Moving from Data Poor to Data Rich: A Case Study of Community-Based Data Collection for the San Diego Red Sea Urchin Fishery" may be particularly relevant. 

I'm working in Micronesia now with colleagues to help remote island communities develop fishery management programs. This is predicated in part on establishing some rudimentary data collection programs, but we incorporate a great deal of TEK, traditional management methods and other "non-standard" tools in part of course because the usual data simply aren't there. If you're interested in the Micronesia work, let me know and I can direct you to more information.

Hi Hannah. Do not forget that mostly you are talking about a coastat species, and that interactions of the species with artisanal fisheries and fishing gears like trammel and gill nets are quite strong in most of the areas studied so far. So I will begin with the spatial description of the fisheries in terms of fishing grounds, its vulnerarbility for bottlenosed dolphins attacks, target species both for fisheries and as food for the dolphins, and finally distribution and abundance of dolphins in the area where the MPA is suposed to be declared. This will give you an insight of the potential future conflicts with fishermen and guidelines for the zoning of the MPA. These two aspects working together are a critical point in the future failure or success of the MPA to come. Yours,

Pep

Hi Martina,

I may be wrong, but are you using "carry capacity" in the sense of "tourist density?" This being the case, then your question is really about how much human impact -- in the form of visiting tourists and their cars -- the protected area can sustain before negative effects occur for the ecosystem.  If I've got this right, you might consider a couple of approaches.  

One is to measure impacts in terms of established ecosystem metrics, such as plant cover, plant diversity or presence/absence of sensitive (i.e., indicator) species.  A second approach might be to develop metrics that were specific to your concerns and that directly addressed tourist impacts. For example, you might measure soil compaction (from visitor traffic), litter density (trash particles/m2) or perhaps noise levels (from people and cars) in heavily impacted vs. lightly-impacted sites and establish criterion for "acceptable" vs. "unacceptable" impacts.  Of course, establishing good management policy would likely involve a a combination of both approaches.

Hope this helps somewhat.  Good luck with your project.

-Todd

Luis,

Much depends on what you mean by "successful" and come to that what you mean by "management". If you are looking for examples of success of "modern" (i.e. government-centred, science-based, conservation-oriented) fisheries management, you will have to search long and hard, whether you include all fisheries or just the small-scale ones.

On the other hand, human beings managed their fishing, more or less successfully, for millennia before the advent of large-scale, offshore fishing -- during an era when data (in the modern sense) did not exist at all. Ever-evolving variants of the systems used in the distant past have continued to be employed, still with some success, down to the present time, though they are being gradually swept aside by governmental imposition of the "modern" form of management (designed to address the problems of the large-scale, offshore fisheries -- though conspicuously ineffective for that purpose).

The best introduction to the topic is probably the ethnographic literature on the Polynesian, Micronesian and Melanesian peoples. There is also a substantial literature on the lobster fisheries of Maine, which provides insight into an application in a modern, highly-developed nation. Beyond those, you can just delve into the fisheries social-anthropology literature. Not all is directly relevant to the management of fishing but community-based management must be founded in communities and hence their structure must underpin the success (or failure) of that management.

Trevor Kenchington

North Atlantic Right Whale (western Atlantic). The protected areas (such as they are) were developed systematically and therefore constitute a network. The network is inadequate, but better than nothing. The data suggest that the population is increasing slowly. Whether this can be attributed to the system of protected areas remains to be seen. Given the longevity of the whale and its slow intrinsic growth rate, we will not know for a few decades whether the system is working.

See:

Elham, my student just finished work looking at tourism on grey reef shark behaviors (see today's Coral Reefs for a preliminary reef site article about this work). Tourism can certainly impact on the health of a reef (anchoring, pollution, impacting animal behaviors etc) but without interest in the reef environment (or the tourist $$$ it brings in) coral reefs may not be able to be conservatively managed. As mentioned above its always going to be a trade-off

Thank you Azubuike and Alain for your answers. Indeed it is much harder and in the vast majority of cases impossible to eradicate a marine species unless the erradication efforts are made in the very early stages of introduction. The only example of successful eradication I know from the marine environment is that of the 'killer alga' Caulerpa taxifolia from California (Anderson 2005. Biological Invasions 7: 1003-1016). The eradication succeeded because the species was detected very early.

Prevention of new introductions through appropriate management measures for shipping, aquaculture and aquarium trade is feasible and by far more cost-effective than post-introduction attempts to control or eradicate. You might find useful the following recent publication assessing the pathways of introduction of marine species in Europe: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235967067_Invading_European_Seas_assessing_pathways_of_introduction_of_marine_aliens?ev=prf_pub

James, I would think the extensive literature on marine reserves would give some insight, to answer your questions you need to think about site fidelity, mobility and life history. Reserves are particularly useful for defined stages of LH, e.g. juvenile stages that require specific habitat. There does seem to be a relationship between area size and LH in relation to effective protections (see our Blyth-Skyrme et al. paper in Cons Biol.