Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles

Abstract

The removal of invasive mammals from islands is one of society's most powerful tools for preventing extinctions and restoring ecosystems. Given the demonstrable high conservation impact and return on investment of eradications, new networks are needed to fully leverage invasive mammal eradications programs for biodiversity conservation at-large. There have been over 800 invasive mammal eradications from islands, and emerging innovations in technology and techniques suggest that island area will soon no longer be the limiting factor for removing invasive mammals from islands. Rather, securing the necessary social and economic capital will be one main challenge as practitioners target larger and more biologically complex islands. With a new alliance between conservation practitioners and the fisheries sector, biodiversity offsets may be a promising source of capital. A suite of incentives exists for fisheries, NGOs, and governments to embrace a framework that includes fishery bycatch offsets for seabirds and sea turtles. A bycatch management framework based on the hierarchy of ''avoid, minimize, and offset'' from the Convention on Biological Diversity would result in cost-effective conservation gains for many threatened seabirds and sea turtles affected by fisheries. Those involved with island conservation and fisheries management are presented with unprecedented opportunities and challenges to operationalize a scheme that will allow for the verifiable offset of fisheries impacts to seabirds and sea turtles, which would likely result in unparalleled marine conservation gains and novel cross-sector alliances.

Stability of a Seabird Population in the Presence of an Introduced Predator

“…To date, there have been over 787 successful animal eradications from over 582 islands, including 284 rodent eradications (Howald et al 2007, Donlan and Wilcox 2008, Island Conservation 2010 Appendix 1 Population projection matrices built using demographic parameters on Buldir (1990Buldir ( -2010, Kasatochi (1996Kasatochi ( -2007, and Kiska (2001Kiska ( -2010 …”

Dramatic and immediate improvements in insular nesting success for threatened sea turtles and shorebirds following predator management

“…Research has shown that such coastalbased management to reduce predation to shorebird nests helps offset losses at sea as fisheries bycatch (Wilcox and Donlan, 2007). Moreover, and more recently, indications are that reducing predation on sea turtle nests also may mitigate losses at sea as fisheries bycatch for those species (Donlan and Wilcox, 2008). The logical extension of this would also imply general mitigation for calamities at sea such as oil spills.…”

Applied conservation services of the evolutionary theory

“…sharks, turtles, seabirds). The conservation action suggested by Wilcox and Donlan (2007) and Donlan and Wilcox (2008) is to force industrial long-line fisheries to pay for compensating such mortality, using collected funds to restore habitat quality at breeding grounds, e.g. by eliminating invasive rats in seabird colonies.…”