Optimization of social-ecological fit in China's Sousa Chinensis protected areas based on modified Moran's I

Abstract

Global social-ecological fit challenges require generalized methods that quantify the degree of human-nature matching to identify and optimize common problems in the world's coasts and oceans. Despite progress in depicting social-ecological interdependency, focus is less on measuring universally applicable and quantitatively comparable fit. By reviewing international marine protected areas' fit problems and transforming qualitative subgraphs to quantitative submatrices, the modified Moran's I can measure social-ecological fit in worldwide scenarios. As an example, results of China's 6 Sousa chinensis marine protected areas include: (1) Quantitative calculations aligned with qualitative motifs, indicating a gradient of fit degrees and motif types; (2) Fit degree was significant at the 95% confidence level after of 10,000 randomizations; (3) Fit degrees could be predicted with over 90% accuracy by common network attributes including betweenness centrality, clustering centrality, degree centrality and eigenvector centrality in 10,000 cross-validations; (4) The development pathway, stages and resilience of fit were presented. Fit problems and solutions were categorized into four groups based on the fit degrees. Governance insights for international practitioners include enhancing access to ecological resources through strengthening connections, avoiding overexploitation of resources via values creation, and following the adaptation-transformation pathway in co-management programs. Without any environmental restrictions and species specifications, the mathematically defined indicator of fit can be applied to other social-ecological systems to offer optimization strategies locally and internationally.