United kingdom sets up Chagos Islands marine reserve

The UK government has designated an area around the Chagos Islands as the world's largest marine reserve.The reserve would cover a 544,000 sq km area around the Indian Ocean archipelago, regarded as one of the world's richest marine ecosystems. This will include a "no-take" marine reserve where commercial fishing will be banned. But islanders, who live in exile, have expressed concern that a reserve may in effect ban them from returning. The UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband said establishing the reserve would "double the global coverage of the world's oceans under protection". He commented: "Its creation is a major step forward for protecting the oceans, not just around BIOT [the British Indian Ocean Territory] itself, but also throughout the world. "This measure is a further demonstration of how the UK takes its international environmental responsibilities seriously." Conservationists say the combination of tropical islands, unspoiled coral reefs and adjacent oceanic abyss makes the area a biodiversity hotspot of global importance. The archipelago has been compared to to the Galapagos Islands and is said to possess up to half the healthy reefs in the Indian Ocean. William Marsden, chairman of the Chagos Conservation Trust, commented: "Today's decision by the British government is inspirational. It will protect a treasure trove of tropical, marine wildlife for posterity and create a safe haven for breeding fish stocks for the benefit of people in the region." However, Chagossians have previously said the protected zone could prevent them from fishing - their main livelihood. The former residents, who were evicted from the British overseas territory between 1967 and 1971 to make way for a US Air Force base on the largest island, Diego Garcia, have fought a long-running battle in the UK courts for the right to return. Alistair Gammell, from the Pew Environment Group, said he was "thrilled" with the decision, adding that the oceans "desperately need better protection". He commented: "In 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, the UK has secured a conservation legacy which is unrivalled in scale and significance, demonstrating to the world that it is a leader in conserving the world's marine resources for the benefit of future generations." The Foreign Office said it had been advised that the BIOT was crucial for repopulating coral systems along the East Coast of Africa and hence to the recovery in the marine food supply in sub-Saharan Africa. The conditions of the marine protected area are expected to be enforced by the territory's patrol vessel.

Can marine reserves boost fish populations outside their borders?

A new study shows that higher fish reproduction inside marine reserves is likely to benefit fisheries outside, as ocean currents carry the tiny, young fish to surrounding waters.
However, the study also indicates that if the young, exported from marine reserves, disperse across large areas it may be extremely difficult to detect a boost to fisheries.
Robin Pelc and three collaborators used a new modeling approach to explore the potential impacts of marine protected areas on fish populations outside the reserve boundaries. The findings appear in a special edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that focuses on marine reserves.
Typically, marine reserves prohibit fishing, oil extraction, seabed mining, or other destructive and extractive human activities. In the last decade, these types of protected areas have become increasingly popular as a tool for ocean conservation and management.
Marine reserves are widely recognized as having many conservation benefits within their borders. Numerous studies have shown that population densities of fish and invertebrate species tend to be higher, biodiversity tends to be greater, and body sizes of fish and invertebrates tend to be bigger.
However, many fishermen oppose new preservation because they do not want to lose access to fishing grounds, and they believe that the same fishing effort will be squeezed into a smaller area outside the reserves.
So far, their opposition has not been swayed by the possibility that marine reserves might boost fisheries by "seeding" surrounding areas with planktonic offspring of fish and invertebrates that drift outside the boundaries. To date, empirical evidence to support this idea has been scant.
Pelc and her coauthors used a “simple idealized coastline model to estimate the expected magnitude and spatial scale of larval export from no-take marine across a range of reserve sizes and larval dispersal scales.” Most notably, they found that,
“Given the magnitude of increased production typically found in marine reserves, benefits from larval export are nearly always large enough to offset increased mortality outside marine reserves due to displaced fishing effort.”
However, the increase at any given point outside the marine reserves would be quite small, meaning it would be nearly impossible to see in field studies. So, while this new research clarifies that marine reserves could benefit fisheries, it also indicates that the positive impact may be extraordinarily difficult to detect.
Managers and conservationists therefore face a daunting scientific challenge if they need real-world data to convince fishermen that marine reserves can help sustain their livelihoods.
--Reviewed by Peter Taylor
Pelc, R., Warner, R., Gaines, S., & Paris, C. (2010). Marine Reserves Special Feature: Detecting larval export from marine reserves Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0907368107

Marine Reserves Can Be An Effective Tool For Managing Fisheries

Studies conducted in California and elsewhere provide support for the use of marine reserves as a tool for managing fisheries and protecting marine habitats, according to biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

A recent study in the Gulf of California, for example, confirmed the validity of a key concept behind marine reserves--the idea that offspring produced in a protected area can replenish the stocks of harvested species outside the reserve.
"It seems really obvious, but it had never been tested," said Peter Raimondi, professor and chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCSC and coauthor of a paper describing the findings in the journal PLoS One.
"We created a model to predict the dispersal of larvae outside the reserves, and the results were completely consistent with our predictions," he said.
Raimondi is involved in a collaborative project (called PANGAS) in which researchers are working with Mexican fishing communities to study and manage fisheries in the northern Gulf of California. Local fishermen in the area of Puerto Peñasco set up a network of marine reserves as part of a community-based effort to manage their resources. Ecological and social studies conducted before, during, and after the establishment of those reserves enabled the researchers to track the results.
Raimondi emphasized that resource managers have a wide range of tools at their disposal and must take into account both biological and social factors in choosing the best approach. Many species, such as tuna and squid, move around too much to be protected by setting aside certain areas. For species that tend to stay put, marine protected areas can range from no-take reserves to various levels of limited harvesting, and sometimes involve restrictions on who can harvest fish in an area rather than how much can be taken.
The establishment of marine protected areas along the California coast, as called for in the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), has been controversial. A network of protected areas was established on the Central Coast in 2006, and a plan for the North-Central Coast was adopted in August 2009. In Southern California, a task force will soon make recommendations to the state Fish and Game Commission, while on the North Coast the planning process is just getting started.
Raimondi and Mark Carr, also a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCSC, have been actively involved in this initiative. In addition to serving on science advisory teams, they are engaged in an intensive monitoring program to track the effects of the reserves that have already been established.
"We are monitoring those areas at unprecedented levels. It's a comprehensive effort to characterize the populations and the ecosystems so that we can compare the responses to different types of protection," Carr said. "Monitoring studies around the globe systematically show positive responses within protected areas. We want to really identify what aspects of reserve design are important in influencing those benefits."
According to Carr, it will take a few more years of monitoring to see the effects of the Central Coast reserves. In the Channel Islands, however, where reserves were established in 2003 (separately from the MLPA process), surveys have yielded the kinds of results scientists expect to see in protected areas. For example, fish species targeted by fishermen tend to be bigger and more plentiful within the reserves.
This effect is important, because studies have shown that larger, older females are much more important than younger fish in maintaining healthy populations of species such as West Coast rockfish.
"When you have a protected population, you not only get spillover effects when fish swim out of the reserve and get caught, you also have major effects on larval production," Carr said. "The bigger, older fish in the reserve produce a lot of larvae that replenish the fished populations outside."
Carr, who contributed to a report on the first five years of monitoring in the Channel Islands, said that the conclusions are limited by a lack of data collected before the reserves were created. It is possible that some of the observed differences existed before the areas were protected, but such doubts will be erased if current population trends continue, he said.
In Puerto Peñasco, the shellfish harvested by local fishermen grow and reproduce quickly. As a result, the fishermen saw beneficial effects within a year after they had established a network of reserves. Subsequent events, however, underscored the role of social factors in the success of fishery management efforts. A second paper, published in PLoS ONE in July, describes how, after its initial success, the local reserve system collapsed due to poaching by outsiders.
"The whole thing got wiped out due to disruption of the social structure that had supported it," Raimondi said. "Scientifically it was really interesting, but for the people who experienced it on the ground, it was terrible."
Richard Cudney-Bueno, a research associate at UCSC's Institute of Marine Sciences and cofounder of the PANGAS project, is the lead author of both papers. "Here was a group of fishermen that had already seen some declines in the shellfish they harvested. This led to the implementation of community-based efforts to manage their resources, including the establishment of marine reserves," he said. "We found that local control of community resources can work, but there has to be broader government support to back up the local efforts."
A native of Mexico City, Cudney-Bueno has been working with Mexican fishing communities and conducting ecological and social research in the Gulf of California since the mid-1990s. He now has a joint position with UCSC, the University of Arizona, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
The first reserve in the Puerto Peñasco area was established in 2001 around an island. Cudney-Bueno and other researchers, working with a Mexican nonprofit organization (Centro Intercultural de Estudios de Desiertos y Océanos), trained the fishermen to monitor shellfish populations in and around the reserve. "The response was really quick, so they could see a classic reserve effect one year later," Cudney-Bueno said. "That led to more areas being closed, and the first paper shows the effects of the network of reserves."
The cooperative was so successful it was recognized by the Mexican government with a Presidential Conservation Award. But word spread quickly along the coast about the thriving shellfish populations in Puerto Peñasco, and other fishermen from outside the community began to move in and poach from the reserves. After poaching began, the system of cooperation that had established and protected the reserves broke down.
Now, the situation is beginning to improve again, Cudney-Bueno said. The Mexican government has created one of a handful of exclusive fishing zones in the Gulf of California, giving the local cooperative the exclusive legal right to harvest shellfish in the Puerto Peñasco area.
"They now have a strong management plan with legal rights and government support, so I think they will be able to get back to where they were before the poaching started," Cudney-Bueno said. "I see it as part of the evolution of a management system. Social change takes time, and it really hasn't been that long. A lot is happening now in Mexico and around the world as local people are increasingly asking for control over their resources. Various fishing communities in Mexico, including lobster and abalone fishermen in Baja California, have moved forward with the establishment of their own marine reserves and government-backed forms of territorial-use rights."
The PANGAS project, which brings together experts from UCSC, the University of Arizona, and several collaborating academic institutions and nonprofit organizations in Mexico, is working with other fishing communities in the Gulf of California to develop management plans for the region's marine resources.
"PANGAS is now working with the Mexican government to build management plans for a series of species in the northern Gulf of California," Raimondi said. "It's interesting to compare that with the MLPA process in California. The approaches are very different, and it has to do with differences in government and social structures."
According to Carr, the California MLPA process is now being used as a model in other parts of the world, most notably in the United Kingdom.

Can Florida's new marine reserve replenish the Gulf's fish?

Can Florida's new marine reserve replenish the Gulf's fish?Amid warnings that global seafood stocks could dry up by 2048, the stateacts to guard its waters.
By Richard Luscombe Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. -
With 1,350 miles of coastline and a $62 billiontourism industry largely dependent on the quality of its waters, Florida hasgood reason to fear the disastrous consequences of pollution andoverfishing. In the wake of a warning earlier this month that the world's seafood stockscould be depleted by 2048, Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and his cabinet have signed offon a pioneering marine protection plan that some experts say should become amodel for the nation. All fishing will be banned in a 46-square-mile stretchof ocean 70 miles west of Key West, which will be incorporated within theDry Tortugas National Park to create the largest marine reserve in thecontinental US. "It's a huge step forward for marine ecosystem management in Florida," saysDavid White, a regional director for the Ocean Conservancy. "Protecting theecological integrity of the area, including the country's only living coralreef, was the cake. The icing is the fisheries benefits it will provide. Thefish that spawn there will be spreading throughout the Keys." With stocks of cod, grouper, and other once-prevalent fish at record lowsnationwide - for example, the Ocean Conservancy estimates that numbers ofred snapper in the Gulf of Mexico are at barely 3 percent of historic levels- few dispute the need for immediate action. Florida's plan comes amid othermoves nationwide to protect the nation's waters.