Search results for "marine reserve"

Potential of contemporary evolution to erode fishery benefits from marine reserves

2016

Marine reserves are valued for their ecological role: protecting fish populations from overharvesting while, at the same time, potentially maintaining fisheries yields via recruitment effects (net export of pelagic eggs and larvae) and spillover (net export of post-settled juveniles and mature fish) across reserve borders. Focussing on the spillover effect, we argue that when fitness of the protected individuals depends on the relative size of their home ranges compared to the reserve size, and home range size is a property of the individuals, rapid local adaptation might occur in favour of individuals with smaller home ranges. Individuals that avoid fishing mortality by spending most of th…

Marine reserves : fish life history and ecological traits matter

2010

Copyright by the Ecological Society of America

Italian marine reserve effectiveness: does enforcement matter?

2008

Marine protected areas (MPAs) have become popular tools worldwide for ecosystem conservation and fishery management. Fish assemblages can benefit from protection provided by MPAs, especially those that include fully no-take reserves. Fish response to protection can thus be used to evaluate the effectiveness of marine reserves. Most target fish are high-level predators and their overfishing may affect entire communities through trophic cascades. In the Mediterranean rocky sublittoral, marine reserves may allow fish predators of sea urchins to recover and thus whole communities to be restored from coralline barrens to macroalgae. Such direct and indirect reserve effects, however, are likely t…

Dati preliminari sulla variabilità spazio-temporale di Paracentrotus lividus nell’ AMP “Capo Gallo Isola delle Femmine”

2009

Lobster and cod benefit from small-scale northern marine protected areas: inference from an empirical before - after control-impact study

2013

Published version of an article from the journal: Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences. Alsop available from the Royal Society: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2012.2679 Open Access Marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly implemented as tools to conserve and manage fisheries and target species. Because there are opportunity costs to conservation, there is a need for science-based assessment of MPAs. Here, we present one of the northernmost documentations of MPA effects to date, demonstrated by a replicated before-after control-impact (BACI) approach. In 2006, MPAs were implemented along the Norwegian Skagerrak coast offering complete protection to shellfish and parti…

Density-dependent body growth reduces the potential of marine reserves to enhance yields

2005

1. Some models of marine no-take reserves predict that reserves can enhance fishery yield. However, empirical evidence of this remains inconclusive. One reason for this may be the disregard for density-dependent body growth in most models. Density-dependent body growth links the number and size of individuals, and thus could influence the biomass of fishery yield. 2. We developed an age- and size-structured model of an exploited population and analysed the effect of implementing a no-take reserve of varying size. 3. Protecting part of a population from exploitation in a no-take reserve results in a rapid build-up of biomass inside the reserve because of increased survival. However, when bod…

Marine reserves: size and age do matter

2008

Marine reserves are widely used throughout the world to prevent overfishing and conserve biodiversity, but uncertainties remain about their optimal design. The effects of marine reserves are heterogeneous. Despite theoretical findings, empirical studies have previously found no effect of size on the effectiveness of marine reserves in protecting commercial fish stocks. Using 58 datasets from 19 European marine reserves, we show that reserve size and age do matter: Increasing the size of the no-take zone increases the density of commercial fishes within the reserve compared with outside; whereas the size of the buffer zone has the opposite effect. Moreover, positive effects of marine reserve…

Cultural and socio-economic impacts of Mediterranean marine protected areas

2000

Marine protected areas (MPAs) may be important for protecting the marine environment, but they may also have substantial socio-cultural impacts about which very little is currently known, or acknowledged. In the Mediterranean, few data are available on the socio-economic consequences of MPAs. The present study reviews the existing data on MPAs in Spain, France, Italy and Greece. A general increase in tourist activities in Mediterranean MPAs is evident, as are increases in the abundances of larger fish species, although there are no data indicating yields for fisheries increase adjacent to MPAs. A large increase in the number of divers and vessels using MPAs has already had impacts on natura…

Long-term decrease in sex-specific natural mortality of European lobster within a marine protected area

2013

Marine protected areas (MPAs) and marine reserves hold promise as tools for nature conservation and fisheries management, but data on long-term demographic effects are still sparse. Here, we use a unique capture-mark-recapture data set from Kavra, an MPA on the west coast of Sweden where fishing for European lobster Homarus gammarus has been banned since 1989, to directly quantify annual survival probabilities in the absence of harvest mortality. The non-migratory behaviour of this species allowed multiple recaptures and releases of a large num- ber of individuals within the MPA. We found strong evidence for a long-term decrease in sex - specific natural mortality throughout the study perio…

Selection on fish personality differs between a no-take marine reserve and fished areas

2021

9 pages, 2 tables, 3 figures.-- This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License