Marine protection enhances the resilience of biological communities on temperate rocky reefs

Abstract

Abstract Conservation science faces the urgent challenge of halting the biodiversity loss caused by the biological crisis of the present era. To achieve this, conservation science requires cutting‐edge tools to focus on vital properties of ecosystems, such as the resilience. Resilience informs about the cost of recovering biological communities. Here, we developed a metric to quantify the ecological assemblage recovery cost based on the dissimilarity between unprotected and partially protected communities compared with totally protected communities in Cabo de Gata Marine Reserve. Our results show that the biological assemblage composed of fish, macroinvertebrates and cryptic fish, and macroalgae species in unprotected zones requires a higher ecological recovery cost than in partially protected zones when moving towards a fully protected community. This research contributes to monitoring marine the effectiveness of marine protection from a resilience perspective, with the goal of promoting the use of the recovery cost metric for building resilient coastal ecosystems.