Marine Reserve Function and Design for Fisheries Management

Résumé du livre

Despite decades of focused studies, we remain incapable of predicting the responses of marine systems to human perturbations. Fishery failures in developing countries (e.g., FAO 2000) might be explained by a lack of resources for management. The same explanation cannot account for the widespread failures in industrialized countries like the United States (e.g., NMFS 2002). In large part, the failure is attributable to management systems that require better information than is available, which opens up too much scientific wiggle room in politically charged processes. Simpler systems that leave a certain fraction of all populations off limits to extraction provide substantially greater long-term resiliency (Sladek Nowlis and Bollermann 2002), yet managers typically use management systems that rely heavily on target fishing mortality rates imprecisely determined from poor information, without building in a buffer against inescapable uncertainty. Marine reserves can serve two fundamentally important roles in improving fishery management. By creating an off-limits population, marine reserves provide an invaluable reference area for managers. Similarly, reserves can serve as an effective buffer against uncertainty. Engineers build in safety margins against uncertainty to avoid catastrophes in projects ranging from the guidance system of a moon launch to the structural integrity of a bridge. Fishery managers urgently need this safety margin given the large gaps in our knowledge of complex marine ecosystems. Marine reserves can play central roles in both precautionary and ecosystem-based management. Precautionary management should allow only levels of human activity known to be safe for the ecosystem and long-term prosperity of humans. By providing a safety buffer, marine reserves serve as precautionary management by mitigating against limitations in our knowledge. Impressively, this can be achieved without loss of long-term fishing opportunity (Sladek Nowlis and Roberts 1999; Sladek Nowlis and Bollermann 2002). Ecosystem-based management should take into account the complexities of marine ecosystems. This feat can be accomplished either by gaining a thorough understanding of complex marine ecosystems or by allowing ecosystems was possible -and there is no reason to thrive naturally in designated areas (Buck 1993). Even if a thorough understanding of marine ecosystems was possible -and there is no reason to believe that it is -it would take decades to achieve. Until that day, ecosystem-based management can be achieved best by acknowledging in management decisions the ecological phenomena we know, while allowing marine ecosystems to thrive naturally in designated marine reserves.