Siting marine reserves: stakeholder-based versus science-driven approaches

Abstract

Marine protected areas (MPAs), especially no take MPAs (also referred to as marine reserves), are an emerging tool for marine conservation and management (Gell and Roberts 2003; Lubchenco et al. 2003), and many countries have committed to establishing such areas. Numerous international conventions and agreements encourage the establishment of MPAs. The latest of these is the plan of implementation from the World Summit on Sustainable Development (World Summit on Sustainable Development 2003), where signatory countries committed to establishing a representative network of MPAs by 2012. A set of MPAs is considered a network when connectivity has been taken into account. However, so little is known about marine connectivity that most common uses of the term “network” refer to a set of MPAs. Because many countries are moving towards establishing networks of MPAs, there is a growing need to provide guidance on how to implement such networks.