MPA News
Bringing MPAs Online: The Use of Webcams for Education, Monitoring, and Other Purposes
A fundamental challenge in MPA management is that the resources being protected are often remote – located underwater, out of human eyesight, sometimes kilometers from shore. This can make monitoring, education, and other management activities relatively difficult, compared to parks on land. To address this challenge, some practitioners are using webcam technology: unmanned cameras that transmit live video or still imagery from MPAs to the World Wide Web. On the Web, people can access this footage – resource managers, educators, scientists, enforcement personnel, and the general public. In some cases, individuals at their computers can even operate the cameras from…
Costs and Challenges Involved with Webcams: Interview with Daniel Senie of Caribbean Webcams
If you conduct a Google search for “underwater webcam”, one of the first sites you encounter is for Bonaire WebCams, a series of cameras that transmit video from various locations on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. One of these cameras is the so-called Bonaire ReefCam, located in shallow water inside the Bonaire National Marine Park. The ReefCam is operated privately by a resort and dive operator under permit from the park, and was installed by Caribbean Webcams (http://www.caribbeanwebcams.com). Below, MPA News talks with Daniel Senie, Chief Technology Officer of Caribbean Webcams, about the usefulness and limitations of underwater webcams. MPA…
MPA Perspective: A Practical Rule of Thumb for Spacing in MPA Networks
Editor’s note: Jeffrey Leis is principal research scientist for ichthyology at the Australian Museum. Our March 2003 edition (MPA News 4:9) featured his remarks on larval dispersal and marine reserves, accompanied by an extended online interview. By Jeffrey M. Leis [Note: A full list of the literature cited in the following essay is available.] MPA networks are a series of reserves that individually may be too small to be self-seeding, but that are close enough together so that one reserve can seed another (Palumbi 2002). A major unknown in planning MPA networks is how far apart the individual components of…
Notes & News
New publications on coral bleaching and management There are two new publications available on managing coral reefs in an era of climate change. A Reef Manager’s Guide to Coral Bleaching – co-produced by the (US) National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and IUCN – provides managers with the latest scientific information on the causes of coral bleaching and new strategies for responding to this threat. These strategies include meaningful actions for before, during, and after bleaching events. The guide makes several references to protected areas, such as identifying the key role that MPA networks…
Examining the Role of MPAs in Ecosystem-Based Management, and Vice Versa: Five Examples
In the marine realm, the rising popularity in recent years of the concept of ecosystem-based management – or, alternatively, ecosystem approaches to management – has been swift, with management organizations at multiple levels endorsing it worldwide. The concept involves applying a holistic approach to resource management rather than focusing on a single species or sector. The fundamental idea is simple: because the elements of an ecosystem are interconnected (including species, habitats, and the range of system services they provide to humans), it makes sense to manage them as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected parts. With the…
Research Spotlight: Lessons Learned on MPAs, Conservation, and Customary Sea Tenure in the Western Solomon Islands
Shankar Aswani has spent more than a dozen years researching marine ecosystems and coastal communities in the Solomon Islands in the southwestern Pacific. An anthropologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara (US), Aswani is now leading a project to establish a network of community-based MPAs and seasonal no-take zones in the Solomons, to be managed under customary sea tenure in the nation’s Western Province. More than 25 MPAs have been designated so far as part of the project, mostly in two lagoons (Roviana and Vonavona). Site selection has been based on a combination of marine and social science…
Notes & News
Handbook available on creating MPA boundaries A new handbook provides best practices for the establishment of MPA boundaries. Offering guidance for conceptualizing and writing boundary descriptions, the 66-page Marine Managed Areas: Best Practices for Boundary Making is intended to help reduce boundary misunderstandings and assist the transition from traditional mapping methods to modern, digital techniques based on geographic information systems (GIS). Authored by the (US) Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Marine Boundary Working Group and sponsored by the National Marine Protected Areas Center, the book was written with US resource managers in mind, but offers enough general guidance to be useful…
Oil Spills in Lebanon and the Philippines Highlight Spill Threat to MPAs
Marine protected areas in Lebanon and the Philippines were hit by major oil spills in the months of July and August, with clean-up crews working into September and likely beyond to remove oil from blackened beaches and other habitats. The events highlight the threat posed by spill emergencies to MPAs and surrounding ecosystems, and serve as a reminder to MPA managers of the need for response planning. In Lebanon, the 13-15 July bombing by Israel of a power plant near Beirut caused up to 5 million gallons of oil from the facility to flow into the Mediterranean Sea, fouling more…
Advice for MPA Managers on Oil Spills: Interview with Jim E. Peschel
Jim E. Peschel is an 11-year veteran of the US Coast Guard specializing in pollution response and waterways management, and was the marine operations manager of a national spill-response organization. He now serves as quality assurance manager of a tug and barge company, using training, maintenance, and tools to prevent spills from occurring. Below, Peschel discusses with MPA News what MPA managers can do in response to the threat of oil spills. MPA News: What advice do you have for MPA managers to help them prevent oil spills from occurring near their sites? Peschel: Work with local trade organizations and…
Results from MPA News Poll: Which MPA is “World’s Largest”?
With the intent of encouraging readers to consider where various ocean areas managed for conservation fit along the continuum of “marine protected areas”, the August 2006 edition of MPA News polled readers on which MPA constitutes the largest one in the world, and why. To answer from among the six available choices, readers had to decide first which sites qualified as MPAs. The choices ranged from a relatively archetypal MPA (the recently designated 362,000-km2 Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument) to more unorthodox choices like the International Whaling Commission’s Indian Ocean whale sanctuary or even the high seas, which are…