Stakeholder Perceptions Can Distinguish ‘Paper Parks’ from Marine Protected Areas

While numerous Marine Protected Areas (MPA) have been created in the last decades, their effectiveness must be assessed in the context of the country’s biodiversity conservation policies and must be verified by local observations. Currently, the observations of local stakeholders, such as those from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academics, government civil servants, journalists, and fishers, are not considered in any MPA database. The Sea Around Us has added observations from local stakeholders to address this gap, adding their perspectives to its reconstructed fisheries catch database, and to at least one MPA in each country’s Exclusive Economic Zone. It is important to pursue and incentivize stakeholder knowledge sharing to achieve a better understanding of the current level of marine protection, as this information is a valuable addition to the existing MPA databases. To address this gap, we demonstrated that personal emails containing a one-question questionnaire about the fishing levels in an MPA are an excellent way to gather data from local stakeholders, and that this works especially well for respondents in NGOs, academia, and governments. Of the stakeholders who replied to our personalized email, 66% provided us with the fishing level of the MPA that we asked for. The paper also presents how to access this information through the Sea Around Us website, which details in anonymized form the most common fishing levels for each selected MPA, as perceived or observed by different local stakeholder groups. This information is a unique and novel addition to a website that is concerned with marine conservation and contributes to a more accurate and inclusive discourse around MPAs. This information also helps to identify the gaps that need to be addressed to turn ‘paper parks’ (i.e., MPAs that are legally designated but not effective) into effective MPAs, which can contribute to climate-resilient ‘blue economies’

Stakeholder Perceptions Can Distinguish ‘Paper Parks’ from Marine Protected Areas

While numerous Marine Protected Areas (MPA) have been created in the last decades, their effectiveness must be assessed in the context of the country’s biodiversity conservation policies and must be verified by local observations. Currently, the observations of local stakeholders, such as those from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academics, government civil servants, journalists, and fishers, are not considered in any MPA database. The Sea Around Us has added observations from local stakeholders to address this gap, adding their perspectives to its reconstructed fisheries catch database, and to at least one MPA in each country’s Exclusive Economic Zone. It is important to pursue and incentivize stakeholder knowledge sharing to achieve a better understanding of the current level of marine protection, as this information is a valuable addition to the existing MPA databases. To address this gap, we demonstrated that personal emails containing a one-question questionnaire about the fishing levels in an MPA are an excellent way to gather data from local stakeholders, and that this works especially well for respondents in NGOs, academia, and governments. Of the stakeholders who replied to our personalized email, 66% provided us with the fishing level of the MPA that we asked for. The paper also presents how to access this information through the Sea Around Us website, which details in anonymized form the most common fishing levels for each selected MPA, as perceived or observed by different local stakeholder groups. This information is a unique and novel addition to a website that is concerned with marine conservation and contributes to a more accurate and inclusive discourse around MPAs. This information also helps to identify the gaps that need to be addressed to turn ‘paper parks’ (i.e., MPAs that are legally designated but not effective) into effective MPAs, which can contribute to climate-resilient ‘blue economies’.Science, Faculty ofNon UBCOceans and Fisheries, Institute for theReviewedFacultyResearche

Building bridges between global information systems on marine organisms and ecosystem models

To facilitate the wider implementation of ecosystem modeling platforms and, thereby, to help advance ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) worldwide, tools delivering a large quantity of inputs to ecosystem models are needed. We developed a web application providing OSMOSE ecosystem models with values for trophic, growth and reproduction parameters derived from data from two global information systems (FishBase and SeaLifeBase). Our web application guides the user through simple queries to extract information from FishBase and SeaLifeBase data archives, and it delivers all the configuration files necessary for running an OSMOSE model. Here, we present our web application and demonstrate it for the West Florida Shelf ecosystem. Our software architecture can serve as a basis for designing other advanced web applications using FishBase and SeaLifeBase data in support of EBFM

Fisheries Centre research reports, Vol. 29, no. 3

This report presents the key results of a multi-year activity of the Sea Around Us devoted to assessing the status of marine fisheries globally. This was accomplished by estimating, for the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of all maritime countries and the high seas, the fraction currently left in the sea of the exploited populations of fish and invertebrates that occurred before the onset of large-scale industrial fishing. More precisely, the ‘fraction left’ is the current biomass (B) of a stock relative to its initial biomass (B0), i.e., B/B0. This fraction was estimated for multiple exploited populations (or ‘stocks’) by applying a versatile stock assessment method (CMSY++), whose main features are also described. Altogether, over 2,500 stocks of fish and marine invertebrates (mainly crustaceans such as lobsters and mollusks such as squids) were assessed in the EEZs of countries on five continents and the high seas. These assessments were based mainly on long catch time series (typically 1950 to 2018) but considered, wherever they were available, the results of earlier assessments made by national or international fisheries management bodies. Thus, the evaluations of fisheries status presented herein are not defined by data scarcity; rather, we used all available data pertinent to the status of fisheries in all maritime countries to reduce the uncertainty inherent in all stock assessments. The detailed results of these stock assessments and their supporting data are available on the Sea Around Us website (www.seaaroundus.org). These results will also be used by the Flourishing Ocean Initiative of the Minderoo Foundation, which kindly funded a large part of our catch reconstruction update to 2018 and the stock assessment work described herein.Science, Faculty ofNon UBCOceans and Fisheries, Institute for theUnreviewedFacultyResearche