Marine reserves offer many potential benefits which include protecting ecosystem structure, improving non-consumptive opportunities, improving fishery yields, and increasing knowledge and understanding of marine systems. As can be seen in the graphic above, many of these potential benefits can lead directly to increased economic opportunity in the region served by the Ecological Reserve.
Press Release (3/4/99): First-Year Results Show Sanctuary No-Take Zones Beginning to Change Fish and Lobster Populaitons
Protects Ecosystem Structure, Function, and Integrity
- Protects physical structure of habitat
- Protects ecological processes
- Restores population structure (size and age)
- Restores community composition (presence and abundance)
- Protects biodiversity at all levels
- Protects keystone species
- Protects cascading effects
- Protects vulnerable species
- Protects threshold effects
- Protects second order effects
- Protects food web and trophic structure
- Reduces incidental damage
- Improves system resilience
- Reduces fishing gear impacts
- Maintains high quality feeding areas for fish and wildlife
Improves Non-Consumptive Opportunities
- Enhances and diversifies economic activities
- Enhances and diversifies social activities
- Improves peace-of-mind
- Enhances non-consumptive recreation
- Enhances aesthetic experiences
- Improves wilderness opportunities
- Spiritual connection
- Social activity
- Education
- Enhances conservation appreciation
- Increases sustainable employment opportunities
- Creates public awareness about environment
- Leaves less room for irresponsible development
- Encourages holistic approach to management
- Stabilizes economy
Improves Fishery Yields
- Protects spawning fish stocks
- Increases spawning stock biomass
- Increases spawning density
- Improves stock fecundity
- Provides undisturbed spawning conditions, habitats, sites
- Increase egg and larval production
- Enhances recruitment
- Provides spill over of adults and juveniles
- Reduces chances of recruitment overfishing
- Reduces overfishing of vulnerable species
- Protects diversity of fishing opportunities
- Protects intraspecific genetics from fishery selection
- Enhances recovery from stock collapses and management failures
- Reduces bycatch fishing mortality
- Reduces inadvertent fishing mortality
- Simplifies enforcement and compliance
- Reduces conflicts among users
- Maintains sport trophy fisheries
- Reduces variance of yield
- Allows increased fishing outside reserves
- Facilitates stakeholder involvement in management
- Provides fishery management data to improve fisheries
- Increases understanding and acceptance of fishery management
- Reduces impacts of environmental variability
- Provides some protection with limited resources and w/o data or information
Increases Knowledge and Understanding of Marine Systems
- Provides long-term monitoring sites
- Provides focus for study
- Provides continuity of knowledge in undisturbed site
- Provides opportunity to restore or maintain natural behaviors
- Reduces risks to long-term experiments
- Provides experimental sites needing natural areas
- Provides controlled natural areas for assessing anthropogenic impacts, including fishing and other impacts
- Provides sites for enhanced primary and adult education
- Provides sites for high-level graduate education
1 From: Sobel, J. 1996. "Marine reserves: Necessary tools for biodiversity conservation?", Canadian Museum of Nature. 1996: 8-18
