Department of Biology, University of Pisa, URL CoNISMa, Via Derna 1, Pisa, Italy.
Department of Biology, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada.
Nat Commun. 2024 Feb 28;15(1):1822. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-44976-y.
Protection from direct human impacts can safeguard marine life, yet ocean warming crosses marine protected area boundaries. Here, we test whether protection offers resilience to marine heatwaves from local to network scales. We examine 71,269 timeseries of population abundances for 2269 reef fish species surveyed in 357 protected versus 747 open sites worldwide. We quantify the stability of reef fish abundance from populations to metacommunities, considering responses of species and functional diversity including thermal affinity of different trophic groups. Overall, protection mitigates adverse effects of marine heatwaves on fish abundance, community stability, asynchronous fluctuations and functional richness. We find that local stability is positively related to distance from centers of high human density only in protected areas. We provide evidence that networks of protected areas have persistent reef fish communities in warming oceans by maintaining large populations and promoting stability at different levels of biological organization.
保护措施可以防止人类的直接影响，从而保护海洋生物，但海洋变暖却跨越了海洋保护区的边界。在这里，我们从局部到网络尺度检验保护措施是否能使海洋免受热浪的影响。我们调查了全球 357 个受保护和 747 个开放地点的 2269 种珊瑚鱼的 71269 条种群丰度时间序列，量化了从种群到集合种群的珊瑚鱼丰度稳定性，考虑了物种和功能多样性的响应，包括不同营养级的热亲和性。总的来说，保护措施减轻了海洋热浪对鱼类丰度、群落稳定性、不同功能群的非同步波动和功能丰富度的不利影响。我们发现，只有在受保护的地区，局部稳定性与远离人类高密度中心的距离呈正相关。我们的研究结果提供了证据，证明保护区网络通过维持大种群和促进不同生物组织层次的稳定性，使珊瑚鱼群落在变暖的海洋中得以持续存在。
