Searching for a compromise between biological and economic demands to protect vulnerable habitats.

Identifying vulnerable habitats is necessary to designing and prioritizing efficient marine protected areas (MPAs) to sustain the renewal of living marine resources. However, vulnerable habitats rarely become MPAs due to conflicting interests such as fishing. We propose a spatial framework to help researchers and managers determine optimal conservation areas in a multi-species fishery, while also considering the economic relevance these species may have in a given society, even in data poor situations. We first set different ecological criteria (i.e. species resilience, vulnerability and trophic level) to identify optimal areas for conservation and restoration efforts, which was based on a traditional conservationist approach. We then identified the most economically relevant sites, where the bulk of fishery profits come from. We overlapped the ecologically and economically relevant areas using different thresholds. By ranking the level of overlap between the sites, representing different levels of conflicts between traditional conservation and fishing interests, we suggest alternatives that could increase fishers' acceptance of protected areas. The introduction of some flexibility in the way conservation targets are established could contribute to reaching a middle ground where biological concerns are integrated with economic demands from the fishing sector.

Identifying ecological barriers in marine environment: The case study of Dasyatis marianae.

Ecological barriers are important determinants of the evolution and distributions marine organisms, and a challenge for evolutionary ecologists seeking to understand population structure in the sea. Dasyatis marianae is an endemic Brazilian species that indicates certain restrictions on its distribution probably due to marine barriers. In this study, Bayesian hierarchical spatial models, jointly with environmental and occurrence species data, are used to identify, which elements could generate these barriers on Dasyatis marianae distribution. Results show that salinity and temperature are the most important drivers that play an essential role to limit the distribution of this species. Indeed, low salinity values restrict Dasyatis marianae distribution in the north of the Brazilian coast, while in the south are colder temperatures. These results highlight the need to better define the distribution of marine species, especially for the ones affected by ecological barriers that are more sensitive to environmental changes.

Modeling sensitive parrotfish (Labridae: Scarini) habitats along the Brazilian coast.

In coral reef environments, there is an increasing concern over parrotfish (Labridae: Scarini) due to their rising exploitation by commercial small-scale fisheries, which is leading to significant changes in the reefs' community structure. Three species, Scarus trispinosus (Valenciennes, 1840), Sparisoma frondosum (Agassiz, 1831) and Sparisoma axillare (Steindachner, 1878), currently labeled as threatened, have been intensively targeted in Brazil, mostly on the northeastern coast. Despite their economic importance, ecological interest and worrisome conservation status, not much is known about which variables determine their occurrence. In this study, we adopted a hierarchical Bayesian spatial-temporal approach to map the distribution of these three species along the Brazilian coast, using landing data from three different gears (gillnets, spear guns, and handlines) and environmental variables (bathymetry, shore distance, seabed slope, Sea Surface Temperature and Net Primary Productivity). Our results identify sensitive habitats for parrotfish along the Brazilian coast that would be more suitable to the implementation of spatial-temporal closure measures, which along with the social component fishers could benefit the management and conservation of these species.