Coral reefs are valuable and fragile ecosystems which are under threat from human activities like coral mining. Many countries have built marine protected areas (MPAs) and protect their ecosystems through boat patrol. However, it remains a significant challenge to efficiently patrol the MPAs given the limited patrol resources of the protection agency and potential destructors’ strategic actions...

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) offer a unique opportunity to test the assumption that fishing pressure affects some trophic groups more than others. Removal of larger predators through fishing is often suggested to have positive flow-on effects for some lower trophic groups, in which case protection from fishing should result in suppression of lower trophic groups as predator populations recover...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) have proven to be an effective tool to conserve marine biodiversity and restore ecosystem functioning. Yet, the role of MPAs in providing resilience to global threats, such as biological invasions, is poorly understood. Assessing the effects of MPAs on invasive species is crucial for effective MPA planning and management. We conducted a peer-reviewed literature sur...

Tasmanian reef communities within "no-take" marine protected areas (MPAs) exhibited direct and indirect ecological changes that increasingly manifested over 16 years, eventually transforming into communities not otherwise present in the regional seascape. Data from 14 temperate and subtropical Australian MPAs further demonstrated that ecological changes continue to develop in MPAs over at least...

The monitoring of fisheries target species in three marine protected areas (MPAs) located in the NW Mediterranean provided important conclusions on management effects. The abundance, occurrence and biomass of large fish showed consistent and growing trends inside the MPAs. Fish diversity was also favoured by protection. Nevertheless, spatial variance of these indicators at a medium scale was of...

Large marine protected areas (MPAs), each hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, have been set up by governments around the world over the last decade as part of efforts to reduce ocean biodiversity declines, yet their efficacy is hotly debated. The Chagos Archipelago MPA (640,000 km(2) ) (Indian Ocean) lies at the heart of this debate. We conducted the first satellite tracking of a migrat...

An international effort is underway to establish a representative system of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Southern Ocean to help provide for the long-term conservation of marine biodiversity in the region. Important to this undertaking is knowledge of the distribution of benthic assemblages. Here, our aim is to identify the areas where benthic marine assemblages are likely to differ from...

Little is known about metabolic activity of bacteria, when viscosity of their environment changes. In this work, bacterial metabolic activity in media with viscosity ranging from 0.8 to 29.4 mPas was studied. Viscosities up to 2.4 mPas did not affect metabolic activity of Vibrio ruber. On the other hand, at 29.4 mPas respiration rate and total dehydrogenase activity increased 8 and 4-fold, resp...

Citation: Jessen S, Morgan LE, Bezaury-Creel JE, Barron A, Govender R, Pike EP, Saccomanno VR and Moffitt RA (2017) Measuring MPAs in Continental North America: How Well Protected Are the Ocean Estates of Canada, Mexico, and the USA? Front. Mar. Sci. 4:279. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00279 Measuring MPAs in Continental North America: How Well Protected Are the Ocean Estates of Canada, Mexico, and ...

In the past decade, marine protected areas (MPAs) have become an increasingly used tool for science-based conservation and adaptive management of marine biodiversity and related natural resources. In this review paper, we report on rather complete time-course series (55 years uninterrupted) focusing on comparison of the strong difference, in number and area, in establishing marine (56 MNRs) and...