Integrating Biophysical, Socio-Economic and Governance Principles Into Marine Reserve Design and Management in Mexico: From Theory to Practice

Marine conservation design and fisheries management are increasingly integrating biophysical, socio-economic and governance considerations. Integrative approaches are adopted to achieve more effective, equitable, inclusive, and robust marine policies and practices. This paper describes a participatory process to co-produce biophysical, socio-economic, and governance principles to guide the design and management of marine reserves in three regions of Mexico: the Pacific region of the Baja California Peninsula, the Gulf of California, and the Mexican Caribbean. The process of co-producing the principles included convening a coordination team, reviewing the science, convening multi-stakeholder workshops, developing and communicating the principles with key practitioners and policy makers, and supporting uptake and application to policy and practice. Biophysical principles were related to: habitat representation and risk spreading; protecting critical, special and unique areas; incorporating connectivity; allowing time for recovery; adapting to changes in climate and ocean chemistry; and considering threats and opportunities. Socio-economic principles focused on: integrating the social context, local aspirations, and human-environment interactions; considering economic and non-economic uses, promoting an equitable distribution of costs and benefits, and respecting and maintaining cultural identity and diversity. Governance principles prioritized establishing and ensuring legitimacy and institutional continuity; implementing collaborative and adaptive management; and, promoting effective management. The paper also examines early efforts to implement the principles, next steps to promote further uptake and application in Mexico, and lessons learned from the process. Thus it provides insights into a practical process and a set of principles that are valuable to inform marine conservation and fisheries management processes elsewhere.

Missing interactions: the current state of multispecies connectivity analysis

Designing effective habitat and protected area networks, which sustain species-rich communities is a critical conservation challenge. Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of new computational methods for analyzing and prioritizing the connectivity needs of multiple species. We argue that the goal of multispecies connectivity prioritizations be the long-term persistence of a set of species in a landscape and suggest the index of metapopulation capacity as one metric by which to assess and compare the effectiveness of proposed network designs. Here we present a review of the literature based on 77 papers published between 2010 and 2020, in which we assess the current state and recent advances in multispecies connectivity analysis in terrestrial ecosystems. We summarize the four most employed analytical methods, compare their data requirements, and provide an overview of studies comparing results from multiple methods. We explicitly look at approaches for integrating multiple species considerations into reserve design and identify novel approaches being developed to overcome computational and theoretical challenges posed by multispecies connectivity analyses. We conclude that, while advances have been made over the past decade, the field remains nascent in its ability to integrate multiple species interactions into analytical approaches to connectivity. Furthermore, the field is hampered in its ability to provide robust connectivity assessments for lack of a clear definition and goal for multispecies connectivity, as well as a lack of common metrics for their comparison.

Climate-smart, 3-D protected areas in the high seas

Marine species are moving rapidly in response to warming, often in different directions and with variations by location and depth. This poses challenges to conventional reserve design. We develop a three-dimensional planning approach for the high seas that conserves biodiversity, minimises exposure to climate change, retains species within reserve boundaries, and reduces fishing conflict. Resultant climate-smart networks cover 11% of the high seas (5% of the ocean) and represent low-regret conservation options that are the first places to designate as new high-seas marine reserves. With the current push to increase the area of ocean under protection to 30%, we must confront the challenges of climate-smart three-dimensional conservation in the 41% of the ocean that is beyond countries’ jurisdictions.

Socialscape Ecology: Integrating social factors into spatially-explicit marine conservation planning

Conservation planning is the process of locating, configuring, implementing and maintaining areas that are managed to promote the persistence of biodiversity. In this review, we analyze the ways in which social processes have been integrated into Marxan, a spatially explicit reserve design planning tool. Drawing on 89 peer-reviewed articles published 2005-2020, we analyze the ways in which human activity, values, and processes are spatialized in the environment; something we call socialscape ecology. To quantify this, we used nine categories including three count categories (social costs, targets, and parameters) and six rank categories (reliance on proxies versus direct observation, integration of temporal change, inclusion of sea tenure, analysis across scale, provisioning analysis, and stakeholder participation). We show that remarkably little change occurred over time across eight of the nine categories. One exception to this was an increase in number of studies that integrated temporal variation in their analysis. Ultimately, we argue that greater attention to and integration of social processes and variables into Marxan will improve marine managers’ understanding of not only the ecological but also the social, cultural and political processes that influence the social and ecological success of marine conservation efforts.

Applying conservation reserve design strategies to define ecosystem monitoring priorities

In an era of unprecedented ecological upheaval, accurately monitoring ecosystem change at large spatial scales and over long-time frames is an essential to effective environmental management and conservation. However, economic limitations often preclude revisiting entire monitoring networks at a high enough frequency to accurately detect ecological changes. Thus, a prioritisation strategy is needed to select a subset of sites that meets the principles of complementarity and representativeness of the whole ecological reality. Here, we applied two well-known approaches for conservation design, the ‘minimum set’ and the ‘maximal coverage’ problems, to develop a strategic monitoring prioritisation procedure that compares potential monitoring sites using a suite of alpha and beta biodiversity metrics. To accomplish this, we created a novel function for the R environment that easily performs biodiversity metric comparisons and site prioritisation on a plot-by-plot basis. We tested our procedures using plot data provided by the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) AusPlots, an Australian long-term monitoring network of 774 vegetation and soil monitoring plots. We selected 250 plots and 80% of the total species recorded for the maximal coverage and minimum set problems, respectively. We compared the results of each approach in terms of ecological complementarity (species accumulation) and the spatial and environmental representativeness of the plots selected by the different biodiversity metrics. We repeated the selection process for clusters of plots to incorporate logistic constraints for field expeditions. We found that prioritisation based on species turnover (i.e. selection of the most dissimilar plots in terms of species composition but ignoring species richness) maximised ecological complementarity and spatial representativeness, while also providing high environmental coverage. Species richness was an unreliable metric for spatial representation, whereas plot selection based on corrected weighted endemism failed to capture ecological and environmental variation. Range-rarity-richness was a more balanced metric in terms of complementarity and representativeness. Prioritisation based on species turnover is desirable to cover the maximum variability of the whole network. Synthesis and applications: Our results inform monitoring design and conservation priorities, which should consider changes in the turnover component of the beta diversity instead of being based on univariate metrics.

Wildlife and conservation biology.

This chapter contains questions about wildlife management and conservation, endangered species, nature reserve design and the role of zoos in conservation. The questions are arranged by topic and divided into three levels: foundation, intermediate and advanced.