We present a novel method for designing marine reserves that trades off three important attributes of a conservation plan: habitat condition, habitat representation, and socioeconomic costs. We calculated habitat condition in four ways, using different human impacts as a proxy for condition: all impacts; impacts that cannot be managed with a reserve; land-based impacts; and climate change impacts. We demonstrate our approach in California, where three important tradeoffs emerged. First, reserve systems that have a high chance of protecting good condition habitats cost fishers less than 3.1% of their income. Second, cost to fishers can be reduced by 1/2-2/3 by triaging less than 1/3 of habitats. Finally, increasing the probability of protecting good condition habitats from 50% to 99% costs fishers an additional 1.7% of their income, with roughly 0.3% added costs for each additional 10% confidence. Knowing exactly what the cost of these tradeoffs are informs discussion and potential compromise among stakeholders involved in protected area planning worldwide. ©2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
CITATION STYLE
Klein, C. J., Tulloch, V. J., Halpern, B. S., Selkoe, K. A., Watts, M. E., Steinback, C., … Possingham, H. P. (2013). Tradeoffs in marine reserve design: Habitat condition, representation, and socioeconomic costs. Conservation Letters, 6(5), 324–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12005
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.