An obvious statement? Not so, as it seems. Many Mediterranean coastal states have established marine protected areas (MPAs), however more than 50% of these have no management plans and their regulations, particularly as far as fisheries are concerned, are not enforced. As a result, fish assemblages in these "paper parks" often cannot be distinguished from those found in non-protected waters.
Paolo Guidetti (University of Lecce, Italy) and colleagues have recently published (Biological Conservation, doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2007.12.013) results from research on fish assemblages simultaneously conducted across 15 Italian rocky shore MPAs within the framework of the "Sistema Afrodite" programme.
The authors discovered that only three of the marine reserves investigated had adequate enforcement, and that the degree of recovery of target fish species was tightly linked to the level of surveillance conducted in the MPAs. The study demonstrates the importance of including compliance among the factors considered in evaluating the conservation effectiveness of marine reserves, and warns that in careless analyses positive ecological responses in properly managed reserves can be masked by neutral or even negative results in paper parks.
Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara
(photograph by Tundi Agardy)
Guidetti P., Milazzo M., Bussotti S., Molinari A., Murenu M., Pais A., Spanò N., Balzano R., Agardy T., Boero F., Carrada G., Cattaneo-Vietti R., Cau A., Chemello R., Greco S., Manganaro A., Notarbartolo di Sciara G., Russo G.F., Tunesi L. 2008. Italian marine protected area effectiveness: does enforcement matter? Biological Conservation 141:699-709.
