Dataset Information

Fishing pressure impacts the abundance gradient of European lobsters across the borders of a newly established marine protected area.

ABSTRACT: Marine protected areas (MPAs) are considered viable fisheries management tools due to their potential benefits of adult spillover and recruitment subsidy to nearby fisheries. However, before-after control-impact studies that explore the biological and fishery effects of MPAs to surrounding fisheries are scarce. We present results from a fine-scale spatial gradient study conducted before and after the implementation of a 5 km2 lobster MPA in southern Norway. A significant nonlinear response in lobster abundance, estimated as catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) from experimental fishing, was detected within 2 years of protection. After 4 years, CPUE values inside the MPA had increased by a magnitude of 2.6 compared to before-protection values. CPUE showed a significant nonlinear decline from the centre of the MPA, with a depression immediately outside the border and a plateau in fished areas. Overall fishing pressure almost doubled over the course of the study. The highest increase in fishing pressure (by a magnitude of 3) was recorded within 1 km of the MPA border, providing a plausible cause for the depression in CPUE. Taken together, these results demonstrate the need to regulate fishing pressure in surrounding areas when MPAs are implemented as fishery management tools.

SUBMITTER: Nillos Kleiven PJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6367164 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Fishing pressure impacts the abundance gradient of European lobsters across the borders of a newly established marine protected area.

Nillos Kleiven Portia Joy PJ Espeland Sigurd Heiberg SH Olsen Esben Moland EM Abesamis Rene A RA Moland Even E Kleiven Alf Ring AR

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20190101 1894

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are considered viable fisheries management tools due to their potential benefits of adult spillover and recruitment subsidy to nearby fisheries. However, before-after control-impact studies that explore the biological and fishery effects of MPAs to surrounding fisheries are scarce. We present results from a fine-scale spatial gradient study conducted before and after the implementation of a 5 km<sup>2</sup> lobster MPA in southern Norway. A significant nonlinear res ...[more]

PMID: 30963876

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Project description:Assessments of the effectiveness of marine protected areas (MPAs) usually assume that fishing patterns change exclusively due to the implementation of an MPA. This assumption increases the risk of erroneous conclusions in assessing marine zoning, and consequently counter-productive management actions. Accordingly, it is important to understand how fishers respond to a combination of the implementation of no-take zones, and various climatic and human drivers of change. Those adaptive responses could influence the interpretation of assessment of no-take zone effectiveness, yet few studies have examined these aspects. Indeed, such analysis is often unfeasible in developing countries, due to the dominance of data-poor fisheries, which precludes full examination of the social-ecological outcomes of MPAs. In the Galapagos Marine Reserve (Ecuador), however, the availability of long-term spatially explicit fishery monitoring data (1997-2011) for the spiny lobster fishery allows such an analysis. Accordingly, we evaluated how the spatiotemporal allocation of fishing effort in this multiple-use MPA was affected by the interaction of diverse climatic and human drivers, before and after implementation of no-take zones. Geographic information system modelling techniques were used in combination with boosted regression models to identify how these drivers influenced fishers' behavior. Our results show that the boom-and-bust exploitation of the sea cucumber fishery and the global financial crisis 2007-09, rather than no-take zone implementation, were the most important drivers affecting the distribution of fishing effort across the archipelago. Both drivers triggered substantial macro-scale changes in fishing effort dynamics, which in turn altered the micro-scale dynamics of fishing patterns. Fishers' adaptive responses were identified, and their management implications analyzed. This leads to recommendations for more effective marine and fishery management in the Galapagos, based on improved assessment of the effectiveness of no-take zones.

Dataset Information

Fishing pressure impacts the abundance gradient of European lobsters across the borders of a newly established marine protected area.

Publications

Fishing pressure impacts the abundance gradient of European lobsters across the borders of a newly established marine protected area.

Similar Datasets

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