Abstract
Marine reserves can be effective conservation and fishery management tools, particularly when their design accounts for spatial population connectivity. Yet climate change is expected to significantly alter larval connectivity of many marine species, questioning whether marine reserves designed today will still be effective in the future. Here we predict how alternative marine reserve designs will affect fishery yields. We apply a range of empirically-grounded scenarios for future larval dispersal to fishery models of seven species currently managed through marine reserves in the nearshore waters in Southern California, USA. We show that networks of reserves optimized for future climate conditions differ substantially from networks designed for today’s conditions. However, the benefits of redesign are modest: a set of reserves designed for current conditions commonly produces outcomes within 10% of the best redesigned network, and far outperforms haphazardly designed networks. Thus, investing in the strategic design of marine reserves networks today may pay dividends even if the networks are not modified to keep up with environmental change.
Highlights
Climate change is already precipitating significant changes to the world’s ocean ecosystems, including shifts in species’ distributions, richness, abundance, demography, and phenology (García Molinos et al 2015, Poloczanska et al 2013, 2016)
We focus on RCP8.5 as it corresponds with the highest emission scenario of the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) from the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Pachauri et al 2014)
We find substantial changes in patch-to-patch connectivity arising from our climate change scenario in 2100 for the seven species we study in southern California
Summary
Climate change is already precipitating significant changes to the world’s ocean ecosystems, including shifts in species’ distributions, richness, abundance, demography, and phenology (García Molinos et al 2015, Poloczanska et al 2013, 2016). Other key considerations are the size, spacing, and arrangement of marine reserves relative to scales of dispersal, species life history, and fishing behavior (McLeod et al 2009, Costello et al 2010, Rassweiler et al 2012). Reserves designed without this information can be ineffective or even have counterproductive effects on fishery outcomes (Rassweiler et al 2012). Given the importance of accounting for the environment in reserve design, there are substantial concerns that reserves designed without accounting for climate change may have limited effectiveness in the future (Gerber et al 2014, Andrello et al 2015, Coleman et al 2017, Davies et al 2017)
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