DISES-EX: RUI: Socio-Ecological Feedbacks of Marine Protected Areas: Dynamics of Small-Scale Fishing Communities and Inshore Marine Ecosystems

Middlebury College, Middlebury VT

Investigators

Abstract

Marine protected areas are now commonly used to sustain fisheries production and protect ecosystems. In the past two decades, the marine protected areas have grown exponentially from 2 million to over 27 million square kilometers worldwide. Similarly, in recent decades, "bottom-up" or community-based conservation has become a popular conservation ethic. This approach is endorsed by governmental and non-governmental organizations globally. However, within a given community, factors such as gender, ethnicity, class, and age directly influence access to, control over, and benefits from natural resources. By using a holistic analysis of community that considers gender, class, and race dynamics, this research theorizes that community engagement is positively correlated with marine ecosystem health. In many marine systems, interactions between biological and social variables remain poorly understood. This research examines marine protected areas as a fisheries management tool as well as the efficacy and ethics of community-based conservation. This project will help cultivate relationships between American and Malagasy researchers and key US-based international conservation organizations working to improve marine conservation globally. By focusing on local participation, particularly the role of gendered participation in conservation, this research will also highlight ways to make resource use rules and regulations, as well as conservation strategies, more equitable. This research focuses on building a framework to quantify and qualify feedbacks within reef-based marine systems by investigating the relationship between: (a) ecosystem health (fish abundance, diversity, and size); (b) fisheries targets (species and fishing intensity); and (c) community engagement (the proportion and identity of individuals involved in monitoring, enforcing, or decision-making).The research centers on the interactions between ecosystems, community engagement, and harvest practices associated with small-scale fisheries in Madagascar, an island in the process of tripling its marine protected areas. This research will compare differences in species richness, relative abundance, and biomass between protected and unprotected areas. Additionally, qualitative and quantitative social data will be gathered through semi-structured interviews and randomized surveys of individuals in coastal villages adjacent to each site. These will address harvest practices and fishers' perceptions of and participation in management of marine protected areas. Using these data, the research will parameterize a coupled socio-ecological model to explore how different levels of community engagement, harvest targets, and modes of harvest influence the ecological effects of MPAs and vice versa. The governing hypothesis that community engagement is positively correlated with the overall abundance and diversity of fish species within each marine protected area. Additionally, the research will investigate whether community engagement is positively correlated with the proportion of shorter-ranging versus longer-ranging marine species fished by a community. The research results will illuminate processes associated with marine protected areas in Madagascar and the complex dynamics of coupled marine fishery socio-ecological systems in general. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.