Evaluating the success of a marine protected area: A systematic review approach

Abstract

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), marine areas in which human activities are restricted, are implemented worldwide to protect the marine environment. However, with a large proportion of these MPAs being no more than paper parks, it is important to be able to evaluate MPA success, determined by improvements to biophysical, socio-economic and governance conditions. In this study a systematic literature review was conducted to determine the most frequently used indicators of MPA success. These were then applied to a case study to demonstrate how success can be evaluated. The fifteen most frequently used indicators included species abundance, level of stakeholder participation and the existence of a decision-making and management body. Using the indicator framework with a traffic light system, we demonstrate how an MPA can be evaluated in terms of how well it performs against the indicators using secondary data from the literature. The framework can be used flexibly. For example, where no MPA data currently exist, the framework can be populated by qualitative data provided by local stakeholder knowledge. This system provides a cost-effective and straightforward method for managers and decision-makers to determine the level of success of any MPA and identify areas of weakness. However, given the variety of motivations for MPA establishment, this success needs to be determined in the context of the original management objectives of the MPA with greater weighting being placed on those objectives where appropriate.

Light and Shade in Marine Conservation Across European and Contiguous Seas

“…Some recently developed operational criteria and standards on MPAs success are already available (Edgar et al, 2014;Gallacher et al, 2016) but an EU-level system to evaluate the effectiveness of European MPAs and MPA networks for the attainment of GES is not yet developed. Considering the centralized role of the Regional Sea Conventions in the MSFD implementation, differences in the designation of MPAs are expected to be magnified, due to regional differences in funding, organization, and proportion of EU Member States among the contracting parties.…”

A biodiversity survey of scavenging amphipods in a proposed marine protected area: the Filchner area in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica

“…The development of standard protocols for baited trap deployments combined with video imagining of the benthic communities across areas with distinct environmental characteristics, e.g., across depth, pelagic/benthic biomass and temperature gradients, and in particular nursery or feeding grounds of higher trophic levels, may help to answer questions regarding the 1 3 factors influencing species' distributions and shaping scavenger diversity patterns. As it has been shown that MPAs may significantly improve the resilience of communities (Mellin et al 2016), an increasing knowledge of the invertebrate fauna of the region may help to establish adequate evaluation systems (Gallacher et al 2016) and management plans (Brooks et al 2016;Chown et al 2017) to detect and monitor potential community shifts in times of rapid climate change (Brodersen and Seehausen 2014).…”

The relationship between adaptive management of social-ecological systems and law: a systematic review

“…Research and review articles in English language journals were obtained and assessed through a systematic review. This approach is common in several research fields, including environmental studies (Plummer et al 2012a, Carter et al 2015, and positive outcomes have been observed either with a quantitative or qualitative orientation (Steven et al 2011, Plummer et al 2012b, Ballantyne and Pickering 2015, Gallacher et al 2016, Karpouzoglou et al 2016. We adopted the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Four-Phase Flow Diagram (Moher et al 2009) to search and select the literature (Fig.…”