Divers Discussion Forum
You can reply to the message below by clicking the reply to this message link. If you have a question or have seen something interesting please please send us a new message. Wade or some of our viewers will reply to your questions.
[ Home | Contents | Search | Post a new message | Reply to this message | Next Message | Previous Message ]
From: VINCE KERR
_: 5
Date: 30-08-10
Time: 13:03
MARINE PROTECTED AREAS: Lines of the debate have been drawn as to whether a thorough baseline study is needed before setting aside parts of the ocean as marine protected areas: M.P.A. This can be a difficult issue for people directly involved in the field.
Here is the opinion of Vince Kerr, based on his many teachers such as the ecologist Bill Johannes and Dr Bill Ballantine. Bill has always told us: “a Marine Reserve is an experiment. We do not know what will happen. Just get stuck in and protect a bit of the sea.” Others want to delay matters and spend time making preliminary studies. Wade Doak
MARINE PLANNING FOR FUTURE MARINE SERVES VINCE KERR
Around the world management and specifically, the design of marine protected areas, have most often been done with ‘proxies’ for real ecosystems. These proxies usually have been physical habitats. Where there is more information some key biological information is added. Almost never is there sufficient data to plan on the basis of real community and ecosystem information, let alone the dynamic factors that work on ecosystems like disturbance regimes, weather cycles, currents, larval transport.
Another confounding issue is that in virtually all of the world's oceans now we are dealing with marine systems that are highly impacted upon by man's activity. This begs the question about how useful community and biological detail is to marine planning when it comes from a highly degraded system.
We can have endless debate on how good or bad the habitat proxies are in comparison to the real thing, but this will be a distraction from the job at hand and will be highly biased by the particular marine organism of interest. A conclusion on this drawn from study of algae will very likely be very different than from a study of trevally species. And there are a lot of species to consider if we are ever to achieve perfect information, which obviously is not possible.
So my answer to this question is that I think that decision-makers should work in the best and most practicable way. While the proxies I mention above don't give them perfect information they allow the process to begin and over a whole system, a network, there will be overs and unders so to speak. The network designed around a set of principles applied to basic habitat based spatial information system will on the whole provide a worthwhile result. At the very least it will provide new information on restoration and recovery as it comes to light. Invaluable to guide future changes to the design and management.
To the people who argue we need better more detailed biological and community level information before we proceed, I would argue that in the first instance this is not a realistic approach and in many cases it is simply not achievable due to scales involved, capacity to do the work and even the basic scientific knowledge of species and ecology. There is a paper by a prominent Australian scientist now deceased (R.E. Johannes) that sums up the issues/arguments here perfectly. Please see reference and link below. He discusses the role of scientific data and management decision-making in the Western Pacific region. The context is the historic success of traditional management systems based on observation and learning by doing, versus the idea that detailed scientific information is required before Western style management arrangements are put in place as 'the solution'. A compelling aspect of the argument is the sheer size of the resources in question here in the Western Pacific. He states that in the first instance it is not possible to do adequate detailed monitoring of every reef system that is under management. It’s not possible to even do a reasonable sample of the whole system. All this leads to a conclusion that an adaptive management based on a set of principles is a sensible course for the future.
The sort of habitat based information you are basing your MPA discussions and planning on is in the first instance a reasonable broad scale proxy for real ecosystems and it is certainly a practical approach. It will clearly mesh well with traditional knowledge also. Quite simply where it is possible to included biological information especially targeted at key species this is helpful but not essential.
What is essential and urgent in the South Pacific is to begin the process, to get a basic representative network of reserves in place and to get the local people involved and able to start to restore their traditional knowledge and management systems and resources. This is an island by island, village by village goal, not an academic pursuit.
The case for data-less marine resource management: examples from tropical nearshore finfisheries R. E. Johannes http://www.marinenz.org.nz/index.php/resources/doc_category/the_case_for_data_less_marine_resource_management_examples_from_tropical_ne/ Vince Kerr What's new in NZ http://www.marinenz.org.nz Technical Support Supervisor (TSS) ------------- Kaimātanga Takutai Moana Threats & Aquatic Systems Northland Conservancy, Department of Conservation Direct Dial 09 470 3346 VPN 7246 Cell 027 464 2267 email: vkerr@doc.govt.nz
Last changed: 23-Jul-2011