The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, an area almost the size of Japan, has a new network of no-take areas that significantly improves the protection of biodiversity. The new marine park zoning implements, in a quantitative manner, many of the theoretical design principles discussed in the literature. For example, the new network of no-take areas has at least 20% protection per "bioregion," minimum levels of protection for all known habitats and special or unique features, and minimum sizes for no-take areas of at least 10 or 20 km across at the smallest diameter. Overall, more than 33% of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is now in no-take areas (previously 4.5%). The steps taken leading to this outcome were to clarify to the interested public why the existing level of protection was inadequate; detail the conservation objectives of establishing new notake areas; work with relevant and independent experts to define, and contribute to, the best scientific process to deliver on the objectives; describe the biodiversity (e.g., map bioregions); define operational principles needed to achieve the objectives; invite community input on all of the above; gather and layer the data gathered in round-table discussions; report the degree of achievement of principles for various options of no-take areas; and determine how to address negative impacts. Some of the key success factors in this case have global relevance and include focusing initial communication on the problem to be addressed; applying * email leannef@gbrmpa.gov.au the precautionary principle; using independent experts; facilitating input to decision making; conducting extensive and participatory consultation; having an existing marine park that encompassed much of the ecosystem; having legislative power under federal law; developing high-level support; ensuring agency priority and ownership; and being able to address the issue of displaced fishers.Key Words: biophysical operational principles, cultural operational principles, economic operational principles, reserve-design software, social operational principles Establecimiento deÁreas sin Captura Representativas en la Gran Barrera Arrecifal: Implementación a Gran Escala de la Teoría sobreÁreas Marinas Protegidas Resumen: El Parque Marino Gran Barrera Arrecifal, con una superficie casi del tamaño de Japón, tiene una red deáreas sin captura que incrementa la protección de la biodiversidad significativamente. La nueva zonificación en el parque marino implementa, de manera cuantitativa, muchos de los principios teóricos de diseño discutidos en la literatura. Por ejemplo, la nueva red deáreas sin captura tiene niveles mínimos de protección de por lo menos 20% de protección por "bioregión" en todos los hábitats y rasgos especiales oúnicos conocidos, y tamaños mínimos para lasáreas sin captura de por lo menos 10 o 20 km en el diámetro menor. En general, más de 33% del Parque Marino Gran Barrera Arrecifal está enáreas sin captura (4.5% anteriormente). Los pasos hacia este resultado fueron clarificar al público interesa...

ABSTRACT1. As systems of marine protected areas (MPAs) expand globally, there is a risk that new MPAs will be biased toward places that are remote or unpromising for extractive activities, and hence follow the trend of terrestrial protected areas in being 'residual' to commercial uses. Such locations typically provide little protection to the species and ecosystems that are most exposed to threatening processes.2. There are strong political motivations to establish residual reserves that minimize costs and conflicts with users of natural resources. These motivations will likely remain in place as long as success continues to be measured in terms of area (km 2 ) protected. 3. The global pattern of MPAs was reviewed and appears to be residual, supported by a rapid growth of large, remote MPAs. The extent to which MPAs in Australia are residual nationally and also regionally within the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) Marine Park was also examined.4. Nationally, the recently announced Australian Commonwealth marine reserves were found to be strongly residual, making almost no difference to 'business as usual' for most ocean uses. Underlying this result was the imperative to minimize costs, but without the spatial constraints of explicit quantitative objectives for representing bioregions or the range of ecological features in highly protected zones.5. In contrast, the 2004 rezoning of the GBR was exemplary, and the potential for residual protection was limited by applying a systematic set of planning principles, such as representing a minimum percentage of finely subdivided bioregions. Nonetheless, even at this scale, protection was uneven between bioregions. Withinbioregion heterogeneity might have led to no-take zones being established in areas unsuitable for trawling with a risk that species assemblages differ between areas protected and areas left available for trawling.6. A simple four-step framework of questions for planners and policy makers is proposed to help reverse the emerging residual tendency of MPAs and maximize their effectiveness for conservation. This involves checks on the least-cost approach to establishing MPAs in order to avoid perverse outcomes. #

We compare the value of using habitat categories and species assemblages as surrogates for marine biological diversity in the context of choosing a set of representative areas for a marine reserve network. Habitat categories were based on interpretation of aerial photographs and maps, and on local knowledge. Species assemblages were created from comprehensive survey data on 977 taxa (mainly species), derived from an intensive threeyear study of a temperate marine embayment, and classified into plant, fish, and invertebrate assemblages. Reserves were selected using a heuristic iterative algorithm to simulate a marine reserve network based on 10-80% representation of each surrogate. The effectiveness of each surrogate was evaluated by comparing the number of taxa that would be coincidentally included in each simulated reserve for the bay. Areas selected to represent 10% or 20% of the surrogates were best chosen using fish or invertebrate assemblages, because by spatial coincidence, they included 60-80% of all available taxa. However, areas selected to represent Ն40% of the surrogates were generally best derived from habitat categories, because they included Ն93% of all available taxa. Plant assemblages were generally poor surrogates for overall species richness. These findings suggest that habitatlevel surrogates may be a highly cost-effective method for initial identification of highpriority areas to manage marine diversity of coastal ecosystems.

This paper reports recent developments in Rapfish, a normative, scalable and flexible rapid appraisal technique that integrates both ecological and human dimensions to evaluate the status of fisheries in reference to a norm or goal. Appraisal status targets may be sustainability, compliance with a standard (such as the UN code of conduct for responsible fisheries) or the degree of progress in meeting some other goal or target. The method combines semi-quantitative (e.g. ecological) and qualitative (e.g. social) data via multiple evaluation fields, each of which is assessed through scores assigned to six to 12 attributes or indicators: the scoring method allows user flexibility to adopt a wide range of utility relationships. For assessing sustainability, six evaluation fields have been developed: ecological, technological, economic, social, ethical and institutional. Each field can be assessed directly with a set of scored attributes, or several of the fields can be dealt with in greater detail using nested subfields that themselves comprise multidimensional Rapfish assessments (e.g. the hierarchical institutional field encompasses both governance and management, including a detailed analysis of legality). The user has the choice of including all or only some of the available sustainability fields. For the attributes themselves, there will rarely be quantitative data, but scoring allows these items to be estimated. Indeed, within a normative framework, one important advantage with Rapfish is transparency of the rigour, quality and replicability of the scores. The Rapfish technique employs a constrained multidimensional ordination that is scaled to situate data points within evaluation space. Within each evaluation field, results may be presented as a two-dimensional plot or in a one-dimensional rank order. Uncertainty is expressed through the probability distribution of Monte-Carlo simulations that use the C.L. on each original observation. Overall results of the multidisciplinary analysis may be shown using kite diagrams that compare different locations, time periods (including future projections) and management scenarios, which make policy trade-offs explicit. These enhancements are now available in the R programming language and on an open website, where users can run Rapfish analyses by downloading the software or uploading their data to a user interface.

We compare the value of using habitat categories and species assemblages as surrogates for marine biological diversity in the context of choosing a set of representative areas for a marine reserve network. Habitat categories were based on interpretation of aerial photographs and maps, and on local knowledge. Species assemblages were created from comprehensive survey data on 977 taxa (mainly species), derived from an intensive three‐year study of a temperate marine embayment, and classified into plant, fish, and invertebrate assemblages. Reserves were selected using a heuristic iterative algorithm to simulate a marine reserve network based on 10–80% representation of each surrogate. The effectiveness of each surrogate was evaluated by comparing the number of taxa that would be coincidentally included in each simulated reserve for the bay. Areas selected to represent 10% or 20% of the surrogates were best chosen using fish or invertebrate assemblages, because by spatial coincidence, they included 60–80% of all available taxa. However, areas selected to represent ≥40% of the surrogates were generally best derived from habitat categories, because they included ≥93% of all available taxa. Plant assemblages were generally poor surrogates for overall species richness. These findings suggest that habitat‐level surrogates may be a highly cost‐effective method for initial identification of high‐priority areas to manage marine diversity of coastal ecosystems.

Two global certification and ecolabelling systems – the generic global dolphin‐safe ecolabel and the global Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) ecolabel – are assessed for their present and potential contributions to improving biodiversity conservation in marine capture fisheries. The dolphin‐safe ecolabel appears to have played a minor role in a reduction of dolphin mortality in tuna fisheries, but dolphin populations in the worst‐affected area have not recovered, and it appears that the current level of dolphin by‐catch sanctioned by present‐day fishery management and the ecolabel is not effective enough to achieve population recovery. The MSC ecolabel has established a poorly expressed environmental standard that has resulted in variable interpretations by certifiers, creating an apparently systematic bias in application of the standard to the certified fisheries. Without substantial revision of both these systems, it seems unlikely that they will be able to make major contributions to marine biodiversity conservation because of barriers created by limitations in programme design, lack of robust linkages between the certification standard and biodiversity conservation outcomes, and unclear standards and their inconsistent application in the certification of fisheries.

Abstract1. A continuing debate between environmental scientists and fisheries biologists on the sustainability of fisheries management practices, and the extent of fishing impacts on marine ecosystems, is unlikely to be resolved without fisheryindependent data spanning large geographic and temporal scales. Here, we compare continental-and decadal-scale trends in fisheries catches with underwater reef monitoring data for 533 sites around Australia, and find matching evidence of rapid fish-stock declines.2. Regardless of a high global ranking for fisheries sustainability, catches from Australian wild fisheries decreased by 31% over the past decade. The biomass of large fishes observed on underwater transects decreased significantly over the same period on fished reefs (36% decline) and in marine park zones that allow limited fishing (18% decline), but with a negligible overall change in no-fishing marine reserves. Populations of exploited fishes generally rose within marine reserves and declined outside the reserves, whereas unexploited species showed little difference in population trends within or outside reserves.3. Although changing climate and more precautionary fisheries management contribute to declining fish catches, fisheries-independent transect data suggest that excessive fishing also plays a major role.4. The large number of fishery stocks that remain unmanaged or have poor data, coupled with continuing declines in the stock biomass of managed fish species, indicate that Aichi Target 6 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (i.e. 'by 2020, all fish and invertebrate stocks and aquatic plants are managed and harvested sustainably') will not be achieved in Australia, or elsewhere.5. In order to maintain some naturally functioning food webs supported by large predators and associated ecosystem services in this era of changing climate, a greatly expanded network of effective, fully protected marine protected areas is needed that encompasses global marine biodiversity. The present globally unbalanced situation, with >98% of seas open to some form of fishing, deserves immediate multinational attention.

No abstract