Marine protected areas promote stability of reef fish communities under climate warming.

Protection from direct human impacts can safeguard marine life, yet ocean warming crosses marine protected area boundaries. Here, we test whether protection offers resilience to marine heatwaves from local to network scales. We examine 71,269 timeseries of population abundances for 2269 reef fish species surveyed in 357 protected versus 747 open sites worldwide. We quantify the stability of reef fish abundance from populations to metacommunities, considering responses of species and functional diversity including thermal affinity of different trophic groups. Overall, protection mitigates adverse effects of marine heatwaves on fish abundance, community stability, asynchronous fluctuations and functional richness. We find that local stability is positively related to distance from centers of high human density only in protected areas. We provide evidence that networks of protected areas have persistent reef fish communities in warming oceans by maintaining large populations and promoting stability at different levels of biological organization.

The MPA Guide: A framework to achieve global goals for the ocean.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are conservation tools intended to protect biodiversity, promote healthy and resilient marine ecosystems, and provide societal benefits. Despite codification of MPAs in international agreements, MPA effectiveness is currently undermined by confusion about the many MPA types and consequent wildly differing outcomes. We present a clarifying science-driven framework­The MPA Guide­to aid design and evaluation. The guide categorizes MPAs by stage of establishment and level of protection, specifies the resulting direct and indirect outcomes for biodiversity and human well-being, and describes the key conditions necessary for positive outcomes. Use of this MPA Guide by scientists, managers, policy-makers, and communities can improve effective design, implementation, assessment, and tracking of existing and future MPAs to achieve conservation goals by using scientifically grounded practices.

Fishers' behaviour in response to the implementation of a Marine Protected Area.

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) have been widely proposed as a fisheries management tool in addition to their conservation purposes. Despite this, few studies have satisfactorily assessed the dynamics of fishers' adaptations to the loss of fishing grounds. Here we used data from before, during and after the implementation of the management plan of a temperate Atlantic multiple-use MPA to examine the factors affecting the spatial and temporal distribution of different gears used by the artisanal fishing fleet. The position of vessels and gear types were obtained by visual surveys and related to spatial features of the marine park. A hotspot analysis was conducted to identify heavily utilized patches for each fishing gear and time period. The contribution of individual vessels to each significant cluster was assessed to better understand fishers' choices. Different fisheries responded differently to the implementation of protection measures, with preferred habitats of target species driving much of the fishers' choices. Within each fishery, individual fishers showed distinct strategies with some operating in a broader area whereas others kept preferred territories. Our findings are based on reliable methods that can easily be applied in coastal multipurpose MPAs to monitor and assess fisheries and fishers responses to different management rules and protection levels. This paper is the first in-depth empirical study where fishers' choices from artisanal fisheries were analysed before, during and after the implementation of a MPA, thereby allowing a clearer understanding of the dynamics of local fisheries and providing significant lessons for marine conservation and management of coastal systems.