Scuba Diver Australasia + Ocean Planet
AIMLESS AND INDEFINITE?
The body of scientific literature on marine protected areas may be vast, but the quality of the studies within it is highly variable and riddled with information gaps.
This lack of baseline data, long-time-scale information and good control sites can be a major roadblock to teasing out the effects of an MPA from other rival factors: Were the changes in fish populations caused by the creation of the MPA or by other ocean conditions, fishing pressure or the park’s location? Of the studies Mongabay reviewed, for instance, only three studies accounted for multiple alternative explanations.
“Not enough thought is given to the monitoring design when [a] marine park is being established,” David Gill, a marine researcher at George Mason University and visiting scholar at the NGO Conservation International, told Mongabay.
“The gold standard would be to conduct surveys both inside the marine protected area before it is established and in comparable unprotected sites, and then continuously monitor both sets of conditions over time to see if the changes are just because of the marine protected area, or something else.”
But achieving this gold standard is tricky,
Gabby Ahmadia, a marine biologist with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), told Mongabay.
Take the ongoing monitoring programme at the Bird’s Head seascape in West Papua province, Indonesia. Ahmadia, whose team has been surveying a network of 12 multiple-use MPAs in the seascape, told Mongabay that selecting and then monitoring control sites is uncharted territory. “Nobody had done this before, so it wasn’t something that I could look at in other marine protected areas,” Ahmadia said.
“You can use all your factors and environmental indicators and social criteria to say these would be good control areas, but you can only guess what’ll be underwater,” she said. “Sometimes you go underwater and you think no, this is not a good reef to survey. Or there have been some days when we were surveying sites and the reefs were dead. We spent two to three days searching for intact reefs but we couldn’t find any. It was definitely a learning experience. But we were able to get enough control sites that it did work.”
However, there are a growing number of meta-analyses and systematic reviews; Mongabay’s sample included 10. These distill and explain some of the broader trends associated with MPAs.