Integrating Marine Protected Areas in fisheries management systems: some criteria for ecological efficiency

Abstract

-Through a review of the scientific literature and a more in-depth qualitative meta-analysis of 16 case studies distributed worldwide, this article aims to study impacts of MPAs on marine living resources, ecosystems and related fisheries and to highlight their criteria of efficiency as management tools for a sustainable exploitation. MPAs are efficient for conservation purposes and resource restoration, especially inside their borders. MPAs can also be part of fisheries management systems, but there is a lack of knowledge about their wider scale impacts on fish stocks, ecosystem and fisheries. Adjacent fisheries can increase their catches near closed areas, but such effects are delayed until after MPA establishment and are often limited over distance. Even though local specificities in ecosystems and fishing resources lead to high variability in MPA effects, four major criteria modulate the efficiency of MPAs for fisheries management: (1) the size of the closed area; (2) the level of protection of essential habitats for exploited resources; (3) MPA integration as part of wider integrated fisheries management plans; and (4) efficient monitoring and regulation systems, including participative decision making, to ensure that restrictive measures are respected.

The food limitation hypothesis for juvenile marine fish

“…Quantitative and qualitative factors related to anthropogenic disturbances influence the capacity of C&E nurseries and, thus, the recruitment and the renewal of populations (Cowan et al 2000;Meng et al 2000;Peterson et al 2000;Peterson 2003;Phelan et al 2000;Scharf 2000;Rochette et al 2010). Nursery function must be accounted for in monitoring systems of C&E waters to maintain high ecological status (Beck et al 2001) and especially for the establishment of MPAs to provide and export juveniles, to enhance fishing yields (Pelletier and Magal 1996;Gell and Roberts 2003;Kaplan 2009) and benefit the fisheries (Mesnildrey et al 2013). Measures aiming at improving or preserving the capacity of juvenile habitat are the most effective for improving adult biomass of populations regulated by density dependence during the juvenile phases (Van de Wolfshaar et al 2011).…”

The range of juvenile movements of estuarine and coastal nursery dependent flatfishes: estimation from a meta-analytical approach

“…To that aim, coastal and estuarine Marine Protected Areas could efficiently allow for the protection of essential nursery habitats (Mesnildrey et al, 2013) As many species present both a similar dependence to coastal and estuarine nursery grounds (Seitz et al, 2014) and a moderate dispersion along the life cycle (Pittman et al, 2014), these insights from flatfish case studies could be considered of more general interest and significance across fish taxa.…”

Modelling the impacts of marine protected areas for mobile exploited fish populations and their fisheries: what we recently learnt and where we should be going

“…MPAs in the real world are generally far from being only no-take zones as usually represented in models, but rather consist in a superposition of different zones, with, in general, a central zone where all human extractive activities are prohibited, a "buffer zone" where extractive activities are highly restricted, and a peripheral zone where regulations of activities are less restrictive (Claudet 2011;Mesnildrey et al 2013). Thus, networks of MPAs often are "mosaics" of zones under different regulations (Douvere 2008;Halpern et al 2010;Kelaher et al 2014).…”