Abstract

Worldwide, marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly created to protect and restore selected parts of the oceans, to enhance recreation, fishing, and preservation. The creation of MPAs has outpaced the development and implementation of methods to assess and monitor them and ensure their effectiveness. By using a combination of widely available instruments and software, we demonstrate a practical solution to map bathymetry and animal distributions, characterize their oceanographic habitat, identify the predominant fish species, and estimate their biomasses. The individual methods are ma-ture, and the combination of acoustic- and optical-sampling methods is a practical approach to obtain baseline information on MPAs and then efficiently monitor changes resulting from natural and anthropogenic processes. We present results of a one-day acoustic survey, CTD casts, and video recordings by scuba divers in a MPA around the seamount known as "El Bajo Espititu Santo", located in the southwest Gulf of California, Mexico.

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