Stemming the Tide of Light Pollution Encroaching into Marine Protected Areas

Abstract

Many marine ecosystems are shaped by regimes of natural light guiding the behavior of their constituent species. As evidenced from terrestrial systems, the global introduction of nighttime lighting is likely influencing these behaviors, restructuring marine ecosystems, and compromising the services they provide. Yet the extent to which marine habitats are exposed to artificial light at night is unknown. We quantified nighttime artificial light across the world's network of marine protected areas (MPAs). Artificial light is widespread and increasing in a large percentage of MPAs. While increases are more common among MPAs associated with human activity, artificial light is encroaching into a large proportion of even those marine habitats protected with the strongest legislative designations. Given the current lack of statutory tools, we propose that allocating “Marine Dark Sky Park” status to MPAs will help incentivize responsible authorities to hold back the advance of artificial light.

Assessing the effects of artificial light at night on biodiversity across latitude – Current knowledge gaps

“…New issues have been raised and expressed in reviews (Gaston, Bennie, Davies, & Hopkins, 2013;Gaston, Visser, & Hölker, 2015;Hölker, Wolter, Perkin, & Tockner, 2010;Longcore & Rich, 2004;Navara & Nelson, 2007) and opinions (Nadis, 2002;Smith, 2009) for the last 15 years. As for the other major risk factors for biodiversity, ecosystem exposure to ALAN has been assessed at the global scale (Bennie, Duffy, et al, 2015;Davies, Duffy, Bennie, & Gaston, 2016;Falchi et al, 2016;Guetté, Godet, Juigner, & Robin, 2018;Kyba, Kuester, et al, 2017). These effects range from the molecular (Honnen, Johnston, & Monaghan, 2016) to the community (Bennie et al, 2017;Rich & Longcore, 2006), and ecosystem level (Knop et al, 2017;Lewanzik & Voigt, 2014;Sanders et al, 2015).…”

Artificial light at night alters trophic interactions of intertidal invertebrates

“…) and 35% (20% across their entire area) of marine‐protected areas (Davies et al . ) around the world experience artificial light at night, suggesting that many intertidal ecosystems are exposed. The potential impacts of altering natural day–night cycles that inform the behaviour of many intertidal species nonetheless remains unexplored.…”

Assessment of Light Pollution Impact on Protected Areas in China

“…After the release of the database, it has received the extensive concern by the global conservation biologists and been applied to evaluate the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation at global and regional scales (Davies et al, 2016;Gaston et al, 2015a). In addition to Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, the dataset contains a total of 2158 protected areas in China with boundary, area, protected level and establishment time information.…”

“…The study suggested larger PAs were influenced by light pollution slightly, however, smaller PAs have experienced significant increase of light pollution. Furthermore, Davies assessed the light pollution exposure of marine protected areas and found that artificial light had increased across most marine protected areas (Davies et al, 2016).…”