Incorporating ecological functioning into the designation and management of marine protected areas

Abstract

Marine protected areas are generally designed and managed on the basis of the presence and extent of specific habitat types or the habitats of important species. However, it has become clear that in addition to including these 'structural' elements of marine systems, management strategies should incorporate a consideration of the functional aspects of the ecosystems. Biological traits analysis (BTA) has been successfully used to describe ecological functioning in marine benthic systems. BTA uses a number of biological characteristics expressed by the taxa present as indicators of key ecosystem functions. Two expert workshops were used to examine the potential for the application of BTA in the designation and management of MPAs. They concluded that BTA represented the best tool currently available for quantifying ecological functioning and agreed on 10-key ecological functions delivered by marine benthic communities. Twenty-four biological traits were also identified by the workshops as indices of these ten functions. In order to demonstrate the practical utility of the approach, BTA using these traits, was applied to a dataset covering benthos from within and around the proposed Eddystone Special Area of Conservation (SW England). The case study demonstrated that with the type of data normally available from conservation assessment type surveys, and a knowledge of the relevant biological traits, it is possible to use a consideration of ecological functioning to set boundaries for the MPA and to inform the site management objectives. The use of structure and function information to inform the designation process and subsequent management of marine protected areas is discussed

Can biological invertebrate traits resolve effects of multiple stressors on running water ecosystems?

“…These theoretical studies also stimulated work on applied aspects of trait responses to human-caused stressors (or release from stress after restoration) of organisms such as benthic stream invertebrates Dolédec et al, 1999), stream fish (Ferreira et al, 2007;Schmutz et al, 2007), benthic pond or lake invertebrates (Menetrey et al, 2005;Van Kleef et al, 2006), waterway hydrophytes (Willby, Pygott & Eaton, 2001), lagoon fish, benthic invertebrates, macrophytes and plankton (Mouillot et al, 2006;Pravoni, Da Ponte & Torricelli, 2008), marine benthic invertebrates (Bremner, Frid & Rogers, 2003a;Frid et al, 2008), marine fish (Jennings, Greenstreet & Reynolds, 1999), fluvial floodplain plants, molluscs and insects (Dziock, 2006;Foeckler et al, 2006;Henle et al, 2006) or forest birds (Hausner, Yoccoz & Ims, 2003). These recent assessments of the potential of multiple biological traits to indicate human-caused stressors across a diverse range of organismic groups and ecosystem types indicate perhaps the beginning of a new era in biomonitoring (see also Baird, Rubach & Van den Brink, 2008), the era of using multiple Biological Traits as Indicators (BTIs) of human-caused stressors across ecosystem types.…”

Historic marine invertebrate species inventory: case study of a science baseline towards establishing a marine conservation area

“…One potential goal would be to use the spatial taxonomic information to support better regional ecosystem-based management through developing insights into ecosystem structure and function (Frid et al, 2008). Illustrated in the top of Figure 4 are elements that could augment the database as follows:…”

“…Biodiversity frames the main attributes of ecosystems -composition, structure and function -the science of which remains dominated by research into composition at the species/community level (Angermeier and Schlosser, 1995). As part of composition, species data are central, and, for benthic marine systems, biological characteristics expressed by the taxa present are beginning to be used as indicators of key ecosystem functions (Frid et al, 2008).…”

Natural variability in hard-bottom communities and possible drivers assessed by a time-series study in the SW Baltic Sea: know the noise to detect the change

“…10). However, the most important functional traits (medium to large body size for biomass accrual and longevity; autotrophy for primary production; suspension feeding for pelago-benthic coupling, see Frid et al, 2008) were almost always represented redundantly in a panel community. Medium to large forms are represented by at least one species in all 277 communities, and redundantly so (by 2 or more species) in 98 % of these communities.…”