Abstract

Marine Fishery Reserves (MFRs) have been identified as efficient instruments to achieve certain fishery conservation and management goals. International interest is growing rapidly and design issues are being discussed. No tested, generally accepted biological/ecological guidelines or principles yet exist which allow managers to designate where a reserve should be placed or the habitats that should be included to achieve MFR goals. If an MFR is large enough, goals will eventually be accomplished simply by returning a significant proportion of shelf area to a state prior to exploitation. The difficulty arises when society elects that an MFR is desirable while fishery exploitation must go on. The MFR design challenge is to minimize the amount of fishing ground set aside while building the biological and social support infrastructures for sustainable, and perhaps greater, fishery production for the long term. In these situations MFRs must be ‘small,’ at least until positive fishery impacts of the MFR are locally accepted. Data limitation is a fundamental complication affecting MFR design. Detailed information cannot be available for all areas under consideration. A few well studied systems must yield a set of robust principles that can be applied at other locations. The essential unit of management is habitat and the management goal should be to maintain ecological integrity. Self-sustainability requires that the essential structural and functional components of a system are intact. The field of landscape ecology provides a theoretical context within which to view spatially dependent patterns and processes. If habitat is the unit of management, there must be a system of habitat assessment. The selection of habitats and the maintenance of flow among them could be enhanced if there existed a more precise method of categorizing habitats and determining their relative ecological value. Lindeman’s (1997) “cross-shelf habitat (CSH)” framework offers a potentially powerful methodology in assessing habitats that considers aspects of ecological distribution and flow to be related to the kind, amount and mix of habitats. CSH assessment methods may allow one to efficiently identify priority areas for inclusion into an MFR. While the approach has only been applied to one area (Biscayne Bay, Florida), it merits rigorous field testing elsewhere. The time is opportune to attempt quantifying dynamic habitat attributes most relevant to MFR design.

PDF Preview