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MPA news is a Global News and Analysis on Marine Protected Areas. In this May_June 2010 issue the education spotlight is on our very own Experiencing Marine Reserves programme. This issue features : The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico contributing millions of litres of crude oil entering the water column daily The MPA around the Chagos Archipelego touted as the largest MPA in the world, yet the degree in which fishing will be restricted remains unclear MPA law enforcement Whale Sanctuary in Tokelau Phoenix Islands Protected Area starts fundraising; no-take area to increase over time and much more…
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History of the Whangarei Harbour Marine Reserve
A Secure Future for Pacific Island Nations Based on Ocean Conservation and Management By The Republic of Kiribati President Anote Tong I. Purpose: A summary briefing document for President Anote Tong (Kiribati) to use as a country initiative announcement at the Pacific Leaders Forum (4-7 August 2009, Cairns Australia).
II. Next steps: Following review, amendment as needed and endorsement by Kiribati, officials need to notify the Pacific Island Forum Secretariat (PIFS) of this Kiribati country initiative at the PPAC meeting (14-15 July 2009) or soon thereafter.
III. Desired goal: Kiribati announces the Pacific Oceanscape and component Pacific Ocean Arcs at the 2009 Pacific Leaders Forum with an invitation for collaboration in this initiative consistent with the Pacific Plan and the Forum Leaders Ocean Policy. Kiribati, with the support from Conservation International, can further develop this concept for partnership and resourcing at the Regional Marine Managed Areas Meeting (November, 2009, French Polynesia).
IV. Rationale Ocean conservation and management is the preeminent issue of our time and our region. Pacific Island people have depended on the ocean and its resources for millennia. But with rising sea levels, declining fishery resources, warming ocean temperatures, and pollution, the oceans are now changing rapidly in ways that our ancestors could not imagine, and in ways that degrade our people’s lives and threaten our existence. The time has come for our region to join together and face common threats to the ocean, a resource that moves between our communities and that we share like the atmosphere we breathe. The time has come for a new Pacific Ocean vision as demonstrated by the Pacific Oceanscape.
Ad hoc reserve design has been shown to produce inefficient reserve systems in terrestrial environments, limiting opportunities to achieve conservation goals. In this paper, the authors have devised a framework for systematic marine reserve design using South Australia as a case study. The framework consists of the reservation goals, a database of conservation features, a method for identifying conservation priorities and measures to evaluate the performance of alternative marine reserve systems.
This is an excerpt from a database of locations and approaches to marine conservation planning approaches compiled by Heather Leslie.
In the last decade, there has been increasing interest—particularly among international nongovernmental and multilateral development organizations—in evaluating the effectiveness of conservation and development projects. To evaluate success, we need more comprehensive and case-specific information on how conservation decisions are made. This paper investigates a database that synthesizes information on 27 marine conservation planning cases from around the world. The author collected data on each case’s geographic scale, primary planning objective and outcome, legal and institutional context, degree of stakeholder involvement, and the ecological criteria and tools used to facilitate conservation decisions.
This paper discusses the different criteria which can be assessed in selecting sites to be marine reserves. To avoid the common problem of socio-economic considerations outweighing ecological considerations, the authors develop a series of criteria that allow preliminary evaluation of candidate sites according to their relative biological values in advance of the application of socioeconomic criteria. They include criteria that, while not strictly biological, have a strong influence on the species present or ecological processes. They submit that while the criteria can be applied to the design of reserve networks, they also enable choice of single reserves to be made in the context of the attributes of existing protected areas. The overall goal of their scheme promotes the development of reserve networks that will maintain biodiversity and ecosystem functioning at large scales. They submit that the values of ecosystem goods and services for people ultimately depend on meeting this objective.
This is a very short discussion of the effectiveness of small sized marine reserves. The document looks at a case studies from around the world and discusses the lessons to be learnt from them.
This study describes spatial patterns in the biodiversity (species, assemblages) of rocky reef fishes at a spatial scale relevant to management, and compares the outcomes for this biodiversity from alternative procedures for selecting marine protected areas (MPAs) and from the selection of MPAs for fisheries-related objectives.
This paper discusses how concepts and theory for the design and application of terrestrial reserves is based on our understanding of environmental, ecological, and evolutionary processes responsible for biological diversity and sustainability of terrestrial ecosystems and how humans have influenced these processes. It discusses how well this terrestrial-based theory can be applied toward the design and application of reserves in the coastal marine environment depends, in part, on the degree of similarity between these systems. It then goes on to discuss several marked differences in ecological and evolutionary processes which exist between marine and terrestrial ecosystems as ramifications of fundamental differences in their physical environments (i.e., the relative prevalence of air and water) and contemporary patterns of human impacts. The authors submit that these differences imply some unique design criteria and application of reserves in the marine environment. In explaining the implications of these differences for marine reserve design and application, they identify many of the environmental and ecological processes and design criteria necessary for consideration in the development of such analytical approaches.
