Designing effective reserve networks for nonequilibrium metacommunities
- Publication date
- Publisher
- 'Wiley'
Abstract
The proliferation of efficient fishing practices has promoted the depletion of
commercial stocks around the world and caused significant collateral damage to marine
habitats. Recent empirical studies have shown that marine reserves can play an important role
in reversing these effects. Equilibrium metapopulation models predict that networks of marine
reserves can provide similar benefits so long as individual reserves are sufficiently large to
achieve self-sustainability, or spaced based on the extent of dispersal of the target species in
order to maintain connectivity between neighboring reserves. However, these guidelines have
not been tested in nonequilibrium metacommunity models that exhibit the kinds of complex
spatiotemporal dynamics typically seen in natural marine communities.
Here, we used a spatially explicit predator–prey model whose predictions have been
validated in a marine system to show that current guidelines are not optimal for
metacommunities. In equilibrium metacommunities, there is a community-level trade-off for
designing effective reserves: Networks whose size and spacing are smaller than the extent of
dispersal maximize global predator abundance but minimize global prey abundance because
of trophic cascades, whereas the converse is true for reserve networks whose size and spacing
are larger than the extent of dispersal. In nonequilibrium metacommunities, reserves whose
size and spacing match the extent of spatial autocorrelation in adult abundance (i.e., the extent
of patchiness) escape this community-level trade-off by maximizing global abundance and
persistence of both the prey and the predator. Overall, these results suggest that using the
extent of adult patchiness instead of the extent of larval dispersal as the size and spacing of
reserve networks is critical for designing community-based management strategies. By
emphasizing patchiness over dispersal distance, our results show how the apparent complexity
of nonequilibrium communities can actually simplify management guidelines and reduce
uncertainty associated with the assessment of dispersal in marine environments.Keywords: metacommunities, dynamic resources, spatial management, patchiness, reserve networks, nonequilibrium, trophic cascade