Rewilding of Protected Areas Enhances Resilience of Marine Ecosystems to Extreme Climatic Events

Abstract

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are employed as tools to manage human impacts, especially fishing pressure. By excluding the most destructive activities MPAs can rewild degraded areas of seabed habitat. The potential for MPAs to increase ecosystem resilience from storms is, however, not understood, nor how such events impact seabed habitats. Extreme storm disturbance impact was studied in Lyme Bay MPA, Southwest United Kingdom, where the 2008 exclusion of bottom-towed fishing from the whole site allowed recovery of degraded temperate reef assemblages to a more complex community. Severe storm impacts in 2013–2014 resulted in major damage to the seabed so that assemblages in the MPA were more similar to sites where fishing continued than at any point since the designation of the MPA; the communities were not dominated by species resistant to physical disturbance. Nevertheless, annual surveys since 2014 have demonstrated that the initial recovery of MPA assemblages was much quicker than that seen following the cessation of chronic towed fishing impact in 2008. Likewise, General Additive Mixed Effect Models (GAMMs) showed that inside the MPA increases in diversity metrics post-Storm were greater and more consistent over time than post-Bottom-Towed Fishing. As extreme events are likely to become more common with climate change, wave exposure observations indicated that 29% of coastal reef MPAs around the United Kingdom may be exposed to comparable wave climate extremes, and may be similarly impacted. This paper therefore provides an insight into the likely extent and magnitude of ecological responses of seabed ecosystems to future extreme disturbance events.

A Scientific Synthesis of Marine Protected Areas in the United States: Status and Recommendations

“…A well-designed MPA network can provide additional resilience through the protection of replicate and connected habitats or those that are essential to different life stages, promoting adaptive capacity and providing insurance against catastrophic disturbance, the risks of which rise with climate change (Allison et al, 2003;Sheehan et al, 2021). Across a network, many independently fluctuating populations can provide stability to the metapopulation (Anderson et al, 2015;Hammond et al, 2020).…”

Protecting our coast for everyone's future: Indigenous and scientific knowledge support marine spatial protections proposed by Central Coast First Nations in Pacific Canada

“…The notion that MPAs confer resilience to climate change also applies to sessile organisms with critical ecosystem roles, such as large-bodied sponges and structural corals (Sheehan et al, 2021).…”

“…MPAs that exclude bottom-contact fisheries, sponges and corals have lower baseline levels of physical damage and recover from extreme weather events faster inside than outside MPAs (Sheehan et al, 2021).…”

“…Corals and sponges are very vulnerable to physical damage from bottom‐contact fisheries (Dunham et al, 2018; e.g. Du Preez et al, 2020; Sheehan et al, 2021). BC's trawl fishery reported ≈322 tons of corals and sponges caught as by‐catch between 1996 and 2004 (Ardron et al, 2007).…”

“…The notion that MPAs confer resilience to climate change also applies to sessile organisms with critical ecosystem roles, such as large‐bodied sponges and structural corals (Sheehan et al, 2021). Extreme storm events, which can physically damage these species groups through sedimentation and other processes, are expected to become more frequent with global warming (IPCC, 2021).…”