Impact of pre-closure fishing effort on marine protected area performance in social-ecological dimensions: Implications for developing marine conservation plans

Abstract

Marine protected areas (MPAs) have been increasingly used as a primary tool for fisheries management and conservation. Over the past few decades, the implementation of MPAs has achieved mixed results with regard to conservation goals, which has driven the scientific community to contemplate what factors may determine the effectiveness of an MPA. Most previous analyses have tended to focus on the design criteria of MPAs as well as post-closure management capabilities, but pre-closure conditions are seldom considered. Here, we investigate the effects of varying pre-closure fishing effort scenarios on MPA performance by applying a developed evaluation framework and age-structured dynamic model for the small yellow croaker (Larimichthys polyactis) in Haizhou Bay, China. We specifically focus on the overall fishing pressure imposed on the fish population and the spatial heterogeneity of fishing effort. We used ecological and social indicators to evaluate the effects of MPAs. Our results demonstrate that MPAs with lower pre-closure fishing pressure are more effective than those with higher pre-closure fishing pressure in recovering the fish population. Highly aggregated fishing efforts inside the MPAs prior to their implementations could also make MPAs less effective. By comparing our findings to other studies, we noticed that evaluation metrics and time frames could make a difference in determining the effects of a given MPA, which indicates the importance of monitoring programs. From a social perspective, placing MPAs in heavily exploited areas without additional harvest regulations may result in a tragedy of the commons situation that leads to a significant loss in catches. This study highlights the ecological and social risks of establishing MPAs under different pre-closure fishing scenarios and provides insights for the development of marine conservation plans.