Abstract
AbstractDuring the planning phase the efficacy of different strategies to manage marine resources should ultimately be assessed by their potential impact, or ability to make a difference to ecological and social outcomes. While community‐based and systematic approaches to establishing marine protected areas have their strengths and weaknesses, comparisons of their effectiveness often fail to explicitly address potential impact. Here, we predict conservation impact to compare recently implemented community‐based marine reserves in Tonga to a systematic configuration specifically aimed at maximizing impact. Boosted regression tree outputs indicated that fishing pressure accounted for ∼24% of variation in target species biomass. We estimate that the community‐based approach provides 84% of the recovery potential of the configuration with the greatest potential impact. This high potential impact results from community‐based reserves being located close to villages, where fishing pressure is greatest. These results provide strong support for community‐based marine management, with short‐term benefits likely to accrue even where there is little scope for systematic reserve design.
Highlights
The prevailing combination of ongoing ecosystem exploitation and limited conservation resources highlights the critical need to develop rapid, cost-effective management actions
The boosted regression tree learning rate was set to 0.001 and the interaction depth to 5, which resulted in a best iteration of 1,720 trees
Our results indicate that local fishing pressure is reducing the biomass of target species close to villages, with fishing pressure accounting for ∼24% of the variation in fish biomass
Summary
The prevailing combination of ongoing ecosystem exploitation and limited conservation resources highlights the critical need to develop rapid, cost-effective management actions. The objectives for MPA implementation are broad (Govan & Jupiter, 2013; Jupiter, Cohen, Weeks, Tawake, & Govan, 2014), targeting both general (e.g., increasing biodiversity) and local (e.g., maintaining fish stocks) conservation priorities. Reserve systems have been systematically designed to meet particular objectives of species inclusion, based on the best available knowledge of ecosystems and species distributions (Pressey & Bottrill, 2009). Reserves have been established at ad hoc locations by local communities (Mills, Adams, Pressey, Ban, & Jupiter, 2012). While each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, the degree to which the two differ in effectiveness depends upon
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