Do static and dynamic marine protected areas that restrict pelagic fishing achieve ecological objectives?

Abstract

There has been a recent proliferation of large-scale marine protected areas (MPAs) containing pelagic habitats. These contribute substantially toward meeting the area-based goal of Aichi Biodiversity Target 11 and to managing pelagic ecosystem pressures, including fishing. We assessed theoretical and empirical evidence for the achievement of ecological objectives by static and dynamic spatial management of pelagic fisheries. Exceptionally few studies have assessed ecological responses to MPAs that constrain pelagic fisheries, leaving substantial uncertainty over their efficacy. Assessments have provided a limited basis for causal inferences and have not evaluated whether other management tools would be more effective. Pelagic MPAs have relatively high promise to mitigate fisheries bycatch of species of conservation concern with “slow” life history traits and that form temporally and spatially predictable hotspots, and for some species, to protect habitats important for critical life history stages. It would be challenging to design MPAs to maintain absolute biomass levels of target stocks near targets and above limits: MPAs would need to be extensive to account for broad and variable distributions, and account for catch risk outside of the MPA, including from displaced fishing effort and fishing-the-line. For non-overexploited stocks, which is the status of most target pelagic species and their prey, there would likely be little response in absolute stock biomass to an MPA. While pelagic MPAs have a higher promise of increasing target stocks’ local abundance, evidence with a robust basis for inferring causality is needed. Reducing fishing mortality of prey species might not affect the biomass of their pelagic predators because prey species experience light fishing pressure and because there may be a weak correlation between the absolute abundance of forage fish and their predators. There is an especially limited basis for predicting the effects of MPAs on fisheries-induced evolution (FIE) in pelagic species. We describe how pelagic MPAs could be designed to achieve five ecological objectives without causing cross-taxa conflicts and exacerbating FIE. To fill substantial gaps in knowledge, we prescribe counterfactual-based modeling of time series data of standardized catch records to infer causation in assessments of ecological responses to pelagic MPAs.