Management of Marine Protected Areas

A Network Perspective

Paul D. Goriup

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119075776
• eBook ISBN: 9781119075783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Marine Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

With the health of the world's oceans threatened as never before, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) play a vitally important role in protecting marine and coastal habitats. 

Management of Marine Protected Areas: A Network Perspective draws on the results of a major EU-sponsored research project related to the establishment of networks of MPAs in the Mediterranean and Black Seas that transpired from February 2011 to January 2016. Featuring contributions by leading university- and national research institute-based scientists, chapters utilize the latest research data and developments in marine conservation policy to explore issues related to ways in which networks of MPAs may amplify the effectiveness and conservation benefits of individual areas within them. Topics addressed include the broader socio-economic impacts of MPAs in the Mediterranean and Black Seas; the use of Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) to resolve conflicts between marine resource use and protection; special protection measures under the EU's Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD); ecological value assessments in the Black Sea; the Ecosystem Approach (EA) for managing marine ecosystems; MPAs along Turkey's Black Sea coast; MPAs and offshore wind farms; and managing and monitoring MPA networks within and between the Black and Mediterranean Seas.

Timely and important, Management of Marine Protected Areas: A Network Perspective offers invaluable insights into the role of MPAs in preserving the welfare and long-term viability of our world's oceans.

1
From Marine Protected Areas to MPA Networks

Ferdinando Boero

Università del Salento – CNR‐ISMAR, Italy

The Ecology of Beauty

Just like terrestrial National Parks, Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) were first established at places where biodiversity had some prominent features. In the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, the first MPAs were established at places that were perceived as ‘beautiful’ by scuba divers who started to explore marine landscapes and singled out the most scenic ones (see Abdulla et al., 2008 for a review on Mediterranean MPAs). The European Landscape Convention (ELC) (Council of Europe, 2000) is in line with this approach to site selection. The ELC, in fact, states that ‘The sensory (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, taste) and emotional perception which a population has of its environment and recognition of the latter’s diversity and special historical and cultural features are essential for the respect and safeguarding of the identity of the population itself and for individual enrichment and that of society as a whole’.

What is perceived as valuable in a given environment, then, is part of the heritage of the resident population and contributes to its culture. The positive impressions described in the ELC simply identify beauty, defined as follows in a popular dictionary: ‘a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight’.

The perception of beauty, however, is directly linked to cultural paradigms and can change with them. Cetaceans, for instance, were once perceived as evil ‘monsters’ that brave sailors had to exterminate, as Melville’s story of Moby Dick tells us. Nowadays, they are worshipped as gods. Even white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), again depicted as terrifying beasts in movies like Spielberg’s Jaws, are now considered as highly valuable, deserving strict protection.

Following this aesthetic approach, large vertebrates or, in alternative, beautiful and scenic habitats (i.e. the charismatic expressions of nature) are usually identified as deserving protection, whereas important ecological actors are simply ignored. Everybody wants to save the whales, but nobody wants to save the bacteria, even if bacteria are indispensable for ecosystem functioning (and also for our own body functions), whereas whales are not. On the one hand, our impact on bacteria is not so huge: they become rapidly resistant to antibiotics and are not affected much by our influence, being able to evolve rapidly so as to cope with environmental changes. On the other hand we could easily exterminate cetaceans, if only we intended to do it.

The preservation of beautiful portions of the environment, and of the fauna and flora inhabiting them, has been instrumental in the understanding of the value of nature. This approach to the defence of nature is shared by almost all environmentalist movements who evoke charismatic portions of nature in their logos, full of dolphins and panda bears. The growth of human population, with the adoption of economic paradigms aimed at the continuous growth of the economic capital, as if resources were infinite, has led to an alarming erosion of the planet’s natural capital. Habitat destruction, both on land and in the seas, and climate change show that we need more than beauty to preserve nature. Protected areas, in this framework, have been some sort of surrogate that justified the destruction of nature where protection was not directly enforced. Focusing on the unique and beautiful facets of nature, often perceived as the sole expression of ‘biodiversity’, led to protection of natural structures, while disregarding natural functions that are not restricted to charismatic species and habitats.

Beauty is important, but the conservation of nature requires more than aesthetics.

From Landscapes to Habitats

The European Landscape Convention is centred on the way the culture of a population perceives and modifies nature, somehow ‘improving’ it with wise management. This is particularly evident in countries like Italy, where millennia of agriculture and architecture have led to unique landscapes that are considered of paramount importance in Article 9 of the Italian Constitution. In this sense, the landscape is the result of human interventions that led to changing a ‘wild’ expression of nature into a ‘gentler’ one. Usually the products of these interventions are aesthetically valid, and the result is beauty. However, a beautiful landscape might be limited in the expression of biodiversity (especially if agriculture is involved), calling for the need of preserving nature per se, and not its modifications, whatever their aesthetic value. It can happen, furthermore, that a local ‘culture’ adopts some behaviours that are against the integrity of nature, as happened in Region Apulia with date mussel (Lithophaga lithophaga) consumption. The harvesting of date mussels from rocks caused extensive denudation of Apulian rocky bottoms (Fanelli et al., 1994). The destruction of hard bottom habitats came to an end only after a long process of generating public awareness, together with the enforcement of new laws.

To cope with an overly anthropocentric approach to our interactions with the environment, the EU Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC) embraced a completely different perspective: habitats of community importance must be protected, even if this goes against the aspirations of the resident populations!

Sites protected under the Habitats Directive do not necessarily comprise beautiful landscapes, and the low level of ocean literacy in almost every country is often a source of conflict between the expectations of lay people and the preservation of natural capital. The resident communities are puzzled when they are prevented from building a new harbour just because there is a seagrass meadow on the bottom. Local populations often label as ‘algae’ the phanerogam Posidonia oceanica, whose presence can lead to the establishment of a protected site, and consider it as a nuisance. The decomposing leaves that accumulate on the beach repel tourists, who complain about their appearance and smell. The recognition of the ecosystem service of these accumulations of leaves is not part of local cultures, who do not realize that stranded leaves protect the beach from erosion. The stranded leaves are removed, sometimes with bulldozers, and huge quantities of sand are removed with them. Lacking a buffer of amassed leaves, wave action starts to erode the beach. Beaches are a source of income, and the wider they are, the higher the income, since more tourists can be crammed onto them. Beach erosion reduces incomes, and this is redressed by beach replenishment. Without the protection of Posidonia leaves, however, the newly placed sand is also rapidly eroded and often accumulates on the seagrass meadow, smothering it. Posidonia meadows are bioconstructions, since the new rhizomes grow over the old ones, raising the bottom of the sea and making it more stable. The death of the meadow is a catastrophe for the coast, since its role of erosion buffer ceases to protect the shore. Once the protection from erosion is completely gone, due to unwise management of coastal systems, physical defences are built in order to protect the beach, with a radical change of the whole landscape.

It is undeniable that some ‘cultures’ have a vague understanding of the functioning of nature, and the Habitats Directive is an attempt to bring a more objective approach to our relationship with natural systems.

Our land‐based culture, however, still biases the Habitats Directive because although it considers marine habitats that are not necessarily ‘beautiful’, they are invariably benthic. For the Habitats Directive, the marine space is bi‐dimensional, just as the terrestrial one. The third dimension, on land, is occupied just by the size of bodies, and by the temporary presence of flying organisms in the air, so it is right to speak about ‘areas’. In marine systems, however, the water column is a three‐dimensional habitat for a host of organisms that have almost no interactions with the sea bottom. Since oceans cover over 70% of the Earth, the water column is the most widespread habitat of the planet, and it is a volume. Many marine organisms live their whole life suspended in the water, and even benthic ones derive their food from currents, not to mention the spread of propagules. A Habitats Directive which includes the marine biome but does not consider the third dimension of the water column is fundamentally flawed.

Protecting beautiful places, and managing the habitats of European Community importance, is a first step towards recognizing the significance of the marine environment, inviting science to design an approach to its management and protection that goes beyond the biases of the current ‘culture’. Indeed, it calls for actions aimed at developing the ‘ocean literacy’ to alter our scant perception of the values of the oceans that is linked to our terrestrial history.

From Hunting and Gathering to Farming

If we were just like all the other species on the planet, when our populations increase to above the carrying capacity (i.e. the maximum number of individuals of a species an ecosystem can bear), overly eroding the natural capital that sustains us, our numbers should decrease due to a shortage of resources. This would lead to the re‐constitution of the natural capital, according to the popular prey–predator model developed by Lotka and Volterra (Gatto, 2009), in which we are the predators and the rest of nature is the prey. But we are not like the other species. When confronted with a shortage of natural resources, we abandoned hunting and gathering and invented agriculture (Diamond, 2002). We domesticated a restricted set of animal and plant species, and started to culture them so as to satisfy our needs. Agriculture leads to the eradication of all competing species from a piece of land so as to rear just the domesticated one. The terrestrial ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Editor’s Preface
• 1 From Marine Protected Areas to MPA Networks
• 2 Ecological Effects and Benefits of Mediterranean Marine Protected Areas
• 3 Typology, Management and Monitoring of Marine Protected Area Networks
• 4 Marine Protected Area Governance and Effectiveness Across Networks
• 5 Marine Protected Areas as Spatial Protection Measures under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive
• 6 Socioeconomic Impacts of Networks of Marine Protected Areas
• 7 Multi‐criteria Decision‐Making for Marine Protected Area Design and Management
• 8 Ecosystem‐Based Management for Marine Protected Areas
• 9 Developing Collaboration among Marine Protected Area Managers to Strengthen Network Management
• 10 Eyes Wide Shut
• 11 Marine Protected Areas and Marine Spatial Planning, with Special Reference to the Black Sea
• 12 Black Sea Network of Marine Protected Areas
• 13 Prospects for Marine Protected Areas in the Turkish Black Sea
• 14 Marine Protected Areas and Offshore Wind Farms
• Index
• End User License Agreement