A new wave of marine evidence-based management: emerging challenges and solutions to transform monitoring, evaluating, and reporting

Abstract

Sustainable management and conservation of the world’s oceans requires effective monitoring, evaluation, and reporting (MER). Despite the growing political and social imperative for these activities, there are some persistent and emerging challenges that marine practitioners face in undertaking these activities. In 2015, a diverse group of marine practitioners came together to discuss the emerging challenges associated with marine MER, and potential solutions to address these challenges. Three emerging challenges were identified: (i) the need to incorporate environmental, social and economic dimensions in evaluation and reporting; (ii) the implications of big data, creating challenges in data management and interpretation; and (iii) dealing with uncertainty throughout MER activities. We point to key solutions to address these challenges across MER activities: (i) integrating models into marine management systems to help understand, interpret, and manage the environmental and socio-economic dimensions of uncertain and complex marine systems; (ii) utilizing big data sources and new technologies to collect, process, store, and analyze data; and (iii) applying approaches to evaluate, account for, and report on the multiple sources and types of uncertainty. These solutions point towards a potential for a new wave of evidence-based marine management, through more innovative monitoring, rigorous evaluation and transparent reporting. Effective collaboration and institutional support across the science–management–policy interface will be crucial to deal with emerging challenges, and implement the tools and approaches embedded within these solutions.

Crossroads of the mesoscale circulation

“…The chaotic and turbulent dynamics characterizing the ocean circulation can disperse the patch and make it spread over a large area (say, of size larger than 100 km) within a short time (days to weeks). In this case, a recurrent problem is to locate the sites where to deploy observing stations, capable of monitoring or collecting the dispersed tracer (Addison et al 2018). A second class of problems concerns the case of a sensible region that is influenced by the circulation upstream (Viikmäe et al 2011;Delpeche-Ellmann and Soomere 2013a,b;Soomere et al 2015).…”

Remote monitoring of a deep‐sea marine protected area: The Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents

“…There are many challenges associated with monitoring and management of remote MPAs, including lack of resources, scientific uncertainty and less than unanimous political support for protected areas globally (Addison et al, ; Hedge et al, ). Looking forward, collaborative relationships between policy‐makers, managers, scientists and data archives will be crucial.…”

Utilizing benthic habitat maps to inform biodiversity monitoring in marine protected areas

“…Accounting for the natural variability in the monitored ecosystem (a.k.a. a ‘sensitivity analysis’) reduces uncertainty and can guide effort (Addison et al, ; Parry et al, ). As anticipated, biological variability (dissimilarity) was overall lower within clusters of assemblages than within management zones, with the exception of the cluster ‘mixed sediment‐East’ where a finer delineation of assemblages unresolved in this study might be present.…”

“…Even in MPA networks that did not initially include representation in the design, the ‘representativity’ of such networks is increasingly being assessed as an adaptive management tool (Evans, Peckett, & Howell, ; Foster et al, ). Collecting baseline data on the natural variability of environmentally and biologically heterogenous MPAs is thus a necessary preliminary and highly recommended step to address knowledge gaps and explicitly incorporate this natural variability into the monitoring survey design (Addison et al, ).…”