Fishing Ecology Management and Economics (FEME) - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte - UFRN. Depto. de Ecologia, Natal (RN), Brazil.
Statistical Modeling Ecology Group (SMEG). Departament d'Estadística i Investigació Operativa, Universitat de València, C/Dr. Moliner 50, Burjassot, 46100, Valencia, Spain.
Sci Rep. 2018 May 17;8(1):7791. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-26130-z.
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.
确定脆弱生境对于设计和优先考虑高效的海洋保护区（MPA）以维持海洋生物资源的更新至关重要。然而，由于渔业等利益冲突，脆弱生境很少成为海洋保护区。我们提出了一个空间框架，帮助研究人员和管理者确定多物种渔业中的最佳保护区，同时考虑这些物种在特定社会中的经济相关性，即使在数据匮乏的情况下也是如此。我们首先根据传统的保护主义方法，设定了不同的生态标准（即物种弹性、脆弱性和营养级）来确定保护和恢复工作的最佳区域。然后，我们确定了经济上最相关的地点，即渔业利润的大部分来自这些地点。我们使用不同的阈值来重叠具有生态和经济相关性的区域。通过对不同地点之间的重叠程度进行排名，代表了传统保护和渔业利益之间冲突的不同程度，我们提出了一些替代方案，可以增加渔民对保护区的接受程度。在确定保护目标的方式上引入一些灵活性，可以有助于达成一个中间立场，即生物关注与渔业部门的经济需求相结合。
