Nils Krueck

An MPA Design Approach to Benefit Fisheries: Maximising Larval Export and Minimising Redundancy

Publisher: MDPI AG

Date: 17-11-2021

DOI: 10.3390/D13110586

Abstract: In the design of marine protected areas (MPAs), tailoring reserve placement to facilitate larval export beyond reserve boundaries may support fished populations and fisheries through recruitment subsidies. Intuitively, capturing such connectivity could be purely based on optimising larval dispersal metrics such as export strength. However, this can lead to inefficient or redundant larval connectivity, as the subset of sites with the best connectivity metrics might share many of the same connections, making them, collectively, poor MPA candidates to provide recruitment subsidies to unprotected sites. We propose a simple, dynamic algorithm for reserve placement optimisation designed to select MPAs sequentially, maximising larval export to the overall network, whilst accounting for redundancy in supply from multiple sources. When applied to four regions in the Caribbean, the algorithm consistently outperformed approaches that did not consider supply redundancy, leading to, on average, 20% greater fished biomass in a simulated model. Improvements were most apparent in dense, strongly connected systems such as the Bahamas. Here, MPA placement without redundancy considerations produced fishery benefits worse than random MPA design. Our findings highlight the importance of considering redundancy in MPA design, and offer a novel, simple approach to improving MPA design for achieving fishery objectives.

University Of Tasmania

Location: Australia

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Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP220102446

Start Date: 12-2022

End Date: 11-2025

Amount: $456,000.00

Funder: Australian Research Council