Assessing the Role of Marine Protected Areas in Restoring, Sustaining, and/or Enhancing Fisheries

Fishery managers are charged with fulfilling several societal social and economic objectives. They try and manage fish stocks for optimum yield, ensure that adequate spawning biomass is available for future recruitment success, and minimize the risk of overfishing, all while attempting to preserve jobs and recreational opportunities in the community. We have all been made painfully aware of the many instances where conventional fishery management methods have led to serial overfishing. These highly publicized failures have led many to search for additional tools to successfully management fish stocks. Marine protected areas (MPAs) have been increasingly proposed, evaluated and implemented as management tools for achieving both fisheries and conservation objectives in aquatic ecosystems. Monitoring projects undertaken in coral areas (e.g., Florida Keys, Caribbean, Philippines) have shown that MPAs can have a positive effect on species density, size, biomass, and diversity inside MPAs. As fishers are displaced from no-take marine reserves, concentrating extraction efforts into smaller spaces, current ecological research is addressing whether the increased spillover of adults and increase flow of larvae from MPAs can have positive impacts outside MPAs as well. Many temperate and arctic species are not as habitat centric like many of the tropical species that rely on coral reefs for much of their life histories. Can these areas also provide perceived fishery benefits outside MPAs in adjacent areas even as species tend to have much larger home ranges compared to their tropical counterparts? It is the objective of this special symposium to present results from many MPAs found in different areas (e.g., temperate, tropical) and to assess their contribution to restoring fisheries in overfished area, sustaining fisheries, and enhancing nearby fisheries through bigger and more fecund species found inside MPAs.