More Information on Climate Change and MPAs
Last month, MPA News examined the scientific understanding of climate change in the marine environment, and what global ocean warming could entail for the planning and management of MPAs. Following publication, we spoke with three more scientists, who lent further...
Revisiting High-Seas MPAs: A New Report, and Results of a Workshop
Approximately half of the Earth’s surface consists of the high seas: open-ocean and deep-sea ecosystems beyond the 200-nautical-mile marine jurisdiction of any coastal state. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), nations hold a duty...
Creating MPA Inventories: How Canada and the US Are Meeting the Challenge
As MPAs are designated around the world, keeping track of their locations and what they’re protecting becomes increasingly necessary. In order for resource managers to analyze the breadth or effectiveness of a collection of MPAs, they need to know what is...
Using Biological Survey Data When Selecting MPAs: A Framework
By Mat Vanderklift and Trevor Ward, University of Western Australia
Ecological information is an important basis for the selection of marine protected areas. However, when evaluating areas, planners are often faced with limited and uncertain ecological information on which to base their decisions. They usually do not have good information about the distribution patterns of species, habitats, and ecosystems over extensive areas. Even less is known about the processes that maintain biological diversity (such as those that maintain fish or invertebrate recruitment to an area) and the extent of ecological interconnectedness of different areas.
Arbitrary declaration of areas for MPAs on the basis of poor ecological knowledge leads to a high risk that objectives will not be met. If MPAs are to be more than just paper exercises to appease lobby groups with politically acceptable solutions, appropriate ecological data from a carefully designed process of sampling and analysis are required. MPAs identified and selected using only superficial ecological knowledge will provide a false sense of security, and may disguise continuing decay of marine biological diversity both within and around designated MPAs.