Extending full protection inside existing marine protected areas, or reducing fishing effort outside, can reconcile conservation and fisheries goals

Most fish stocks world-wide are fished at maximum sustainable yield (MSY) or overfished, as many fisheries management strategies have failed to achieve sustainable fishing. Identifying effective fisheries management strategies has now become urgent. Here, we developed a spatially explicit metapopulation model accounting for population connectivity in the north-western Mediterranean Sea, and parameterized it for three ecologically and economically important coastal fish species: the white seabream Diplodus sargus, the two-banded seabream Diplodus vulgaris and the dusky grouper Epinephelus marginatus. We used the model to assess how stock biomass and catches respond to changes in fishing mort…