Long-Distance Benefits of Marine Reserves: Myth or Reality?

Stéphanie Manel (1) , Nicolas Loiseau (2) , Marco Andrello (1) , Katharina Fietz , Raquel Goñi , Aitor Forcada , Philippe Lenfant (3) , Stuart Kininmonth (4) , Concepcion Marcos (5) , Virginie Marquès , Sandra Mallol , Angel Perez-Ruzafa (5) , Corinna Breusing , Oscar Puebla , David Mouillot (6)

1 LECA - Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine
2 EIO - Ecosystèmes Insulaires Océaniens (UMR 241)
3 CEFREM - Centre de Formation et de Recherche sur les Environnements Méditérranéens
4 Stockholm Resilience Centre
5 Universidad de Murcia
6 UMR MARBEC - MARine Biodiversity Exploitation and Conservation

Long-distance (>40-km) dispersal from marine reserves is poorly documented; yet, it can provide essential benefits such as seeding fished areas or connecting marine reserves into networks. From a meta-analysis, we suggest that the spatial scale of marine connectivity is underestimated due to the limited geographic extent of sampling designs. We also found that the largest marine reserves (>1000 km 2 ) are the most isolated. These findings have important implications for the assessment of evolutionary, ecological, and socio-economic long-distance benefits of marine reserves. We conclude that existing methods to infer dispersal should consider the up-to-date genomic advances and also expand the spatial scale of sampling designs. Incorporating long-distance connectivity in conservation planning will contribute to increase the benefits of marine reserve networks.

Domains: Biodiversity and Ecology

Stéphanie Manel, Nicolas Loiseau, Marco Andrello, Katharina Fietz, Raquel Goñi, et al.. Long-Distance Benefits of Marine Reserves: Myth or Reality?. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 2019, 34 (4), pp.342-354. ⟨10.1016/j.tree.2019.01.002⟩. ⟨hal-02331101⟩