Addressing ecosystem effects of fishing using marine protected areas

Impacts of marine protected areas on fishing communities.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a popular conservation strategy, but their impacts on human welfare are poorly understood. To inform future research and policy decisions, we reviewed the scientific literature to assess MPA impacts on five indicators of human welfare: food security, resource rights, employment, community organization, and income. Following MPA establishment, food security gene...

Effects of marine protected areas on overfished fishing stocks with multiple stable states.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) have attracted much attention as a tool for sustainable fisheries management, restoring depleted fisheries stocks and maintaining ecosystems. However, even with total exclusion of fishing effort, depleted stocks sometimes show little or no recovery over a long time period. Here, using a mathematical model, we show that multiple stable states may hold the key to und...

Placing marine protected areas onto the ecosystem-based management seascape.

The rapid increase in the science and implementation of marine protected areas (MPAs) around the world in the past 15 years is now being followed by similar increases in the science and application of marine ecosystem-based management (EBM). Despite important overlaps and some common goals, these two approaches have remained either separated in the literature and in conservation and management ...

Ecosystem effects of fishing.

Context-dependent effects of marine protected areas on predatory interactions

We studied the effects of marine protected areas (MPAs) on predatory interactions at a regional scale of 3 different islands across the geographical gradient of the Canary Islands. Protection measures positively affected predatory fish assemblages, enhancing the intensity of predatory interactions in comparison to equivalent unprotected areas (UAs), and causing indirect effects on populations o...