Efficiency, costs and trade-offs in marine reserve system design

Abstract

With marine biodiversity conservation the primary goal for reserve planning initiatives, a site's conservation potential is typically evaluated on the basis of the biological and physical features it contains. By comparison, socio-economic information is seldom a formal consideration of the reserve system design problem and generally limited to an assessment of threats, vulnerability or compatibility with surrounding uses. This is perhaps surprising given broad recognition that the success of reserve establishment is highly dependent on widespread stakeholder and community support. Using information on the spatial distribution and intensity of commercial rock lobster catch in South Australia, we demonstrate the capacity of mathematical reserve selection procedures to integrate socio-economic and biophysical information for marine reserve system design. Analyses of trade-offs highlight the opportunities to design representative, efficient and practical marine reserve systems that minimise potential loss to commercial users. We found that the objective of minimising the areal extent of the reserve system was barely compromised by incorporating economic design constraints. With a small increase in area (G3%) and boundary length (G10%), the economic impact of marine reserves on the commercial rock lobster fishery was reduced by more than a third. We considered also how a reserve planner might prioritise conservation areas using information on a planning units selection frequency. We found that selection frequencies alone were not a reliable guide for the selection of marine reserve systems, but could be used with approaches such as summed irreplaceability to direct conservation effort for efficient marine reserve design.

Quantifying the Costs and Benefits of Coastal Water Quality Improvements in the Ko Chang Marine National Park, Thailand

“…The viability of the project is demonstrated, if an IRR value is greater than r. A project with a benefit to cost ratio is economically justified when the B/C ratio is greater than one. Generally, the higher the B/C ratio is, the more efficient is the use of available resources (Stewart and Possingham 2005).…”

Striking a Balance between Biodiversity Conservation and Socioeconomic Viability in the Design of Marine Protected Areas

“…The need to strike a balance between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic viability in protectedarea design is evident. Designing a network of marine protected areas that considers both socioeconomic and biodiversity factors has moved to the forefront of systematic conservation planning (Sala et al 2002;Stewart & Possingham 2005;Richardson et al 2006).…”

Cost-effective priorities for global mammal conservation

“…They rely on patterns of species richness, endemism, threat, and/or degree of underrepresentation in existing protected areas networks (19)(20)(21)(22)(23). This is despite the substantial gains in efficiency demonstrated by the few studies at smaller scales that explicitly seek to minimize the cost of biodiversity conservation (13,(24)(25)(26)(27).…”