How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 124: Incorporating Climate Change in Marine Protected Area Planning
Marine Protected Areas are designed to remove the human influence, or disturbance, to the oceans; however, climate change impacts like high sea surface temperatures will affect MPS effectiveness in the future.
Today, I review a study that incorporates sea surface temperature variability in MPA planning.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session124
Welcome to the speaker for Blue Podcast, session 124. Welcome back everybody. Today is research Thursdays. It's really the only thing I've kept normal this week with my cold and cough that I've had and a bit of a flu. I'm starting to feel better. My voice is getting a little better, but I apologize for any kind of raspiness or coughing throughout the show. Anyway, today we're going to talk, we're going to continue on with our climate change talks and warming, temperature warming that we've been discussing in the last couple of days. We're going to talk about how managers are looking to incorporate climate effects such as sea surface temperature warming into their conservation planning. Stay tuned for this episode of the Speaker for Blue Podcast. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another great episode of the Speaker for Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of speakupforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. That's right. I'm an entrepreneur that does everything to protect the ocean. All my business needs and results have to do with protecting the ocean, hence this podcast. And as a business, of course, I try to generate income as well as generate more awareness for, you know, for ocean conservation, for people who don't know much about the ocean issues that are going on in the solutions that we can incorporate or what's happening in ocean. This, the whole point of this podcast is to reach out to the podcast community and say, hey, this is what's going on in the oceans. If you're interested, take a listen and this is what you can do about it and this is what people are doing about it. So if you'd like to support that ocean conservation message to the podcast platforms as well as other platforms that we are trying to reach. So we're trying to reach a digital magazine platform. We're also trying to reach the YouTube platform eventually. You can help support us by going to speakupforblue.com/patreon and we want to thank our current supporters right now, Chris and Claire, Jefford, Dr. Judith Weiss and Ron and Judy, thank you very much for your support. We really appreciate it. Let's get on to the show today. We're going to look. I looked at a research paper. It's by Rafael Magris, Scott Herron and Robert Pressy. I know Robert a little bit, Bob Pressy a little bit and through via email and social networks. But they decided to publish a paper on November 2015 on PLOS1. I found it on the Searching Marine Conservation and the link will be on our show notes at speakupforblue.com/session124, all one word. So the premise of the article, sorry, I lost my train of thought, of the article essentially is obviously sea surface temperature and high temperature waters are stressing out corals as well as other habitats, but especially corals. And right now corals are living at their thermal regime, the upwards of their thermal regime just because of the warming of sea surface temperature and the ocean and the planet really. When we look at protecting, of course, marine protected areas, I've covered a lot. We're looking at protecting these very critical habitats, to biodiversity, to our protection, to our economy. They're very important in many, many different ways. We need to protect them and the best way, the best tool that we have right now is marine protected areas. In other words, marine protected areas take the human aspect, the human extraction and human sort of hands on aspect out of this area to allow the system to just run its course as normal. Okay, so there's no, usually there's no fishing, sometimes there's no tourism, so no divers or anything like that. There's no, any alteration, nothing dumped there, nothing mined, all that kind of stuff. That happens in the ocean on a regular basis. These areas are, you know, are prohibitive from doing that. Other places, other marine protected areas have different levels of management. So sometimes it's a no take, no nothing area where you can't even go in it. Others are just for researchers to study, others are just for fishing, others are just for tourism and all that kind of stuff. And that would be in one area. So for instance, the grape area reef that we talked about yesterday is an example of such area. It has multiple management levels, different zones that you can manage the entire grape area reef but have, basically it's a plan, very similar to our, to sort of like green plans that you have on land where you have different zones that are sort of licensed for different activities, right? That's essentially what we have here. Now when we make those marine protected areas, we look at, we create them, the managers and the practitioners and the scientists get together, they put a lot of data together, put a lot of modeling together, crunch some numbers, use some, you know, subjective expert, expert opinions and stuff, we basically try and bring everything together and say this is what the configuration of that network should be. So it's not just one marine protected area, it's a network of marine protected areas. That is the optimal sort of protected area that you want to have is a network of marine protected areas. And the reason why we have a network of marine protected areas is because we want to have instead of just one large protected area that doesn't allow anything, we have, excuse me, we have a lot of different small marine protected areas that feed into each other. So say you have one upstream, you have a few small marine protected areas, they're sort of products. So whether it be larvae, whether it be larger fish and so forth that grow and are created in those areas will eventually leave those areas and go towards the other protected areas or other areas. So those are extremely important to us as managers and just as people, right? We want to make sure that all those network of marine protected areas are connected in some sort of way, that they feed into each other and that they can just continually produce what we want. Basically biodiversity, we want to see a bigger fish, we want to see more animals, we want to see habitats that are healthy and so forth. But then you've got this thing called climate change that comes into play and it can have an impact on our marine protected areas. Usually what happens when you declare marine, in really a number of different ways, but usually what happens when you have marine protected areas is you have a lot of data that's put into it and you have a configuration that's spit out out of a specific model. And that model essentially is based on that data that's put in. And all that data is affected by all that, that configuration is affected by the data that's put in. So if you put in the right data, it's going to be good. If you put in representative data, so data that makes sense. So you look at places that are, you know, you want to look at areas that have been sampled quite often, you have, you know, you're really proud of the data, you really know this data very well. It's good data and then you put it in this model and it spits out something that's real. That's true. That's what we call representative of what's happening, right? So that we know we're all the fish are. We know where the spawning sites are. We know where the nursery habitats are, the important habitats for all these different fish and other, you know, other species, marine mammals and so forth and invertebrates and all that kind of stuff. And then we look at the human aspect and we put in that kind of data where there's less population, where there's less coastal habitat alteration, where there's less overfishing, where there's, you know, where's the tourism and we map it all out. And then we put it into these models and we kind of get a configuration that is, that give you a number of different configurations that are the best example of what you want to protect depending on what kind of goals you want to protect. So we have all this data, but then we don't incorporate climate change because we don't really know much about climate change. And that's what this article really covers. I know it was a lot of a long introduction to what this article really covers, but it really what it says is when we're doing marine protected area planning, we want to make sure that we incorporate the different spatial and temporal changes in sea surface temperature. Okay, because that will affect your marine protected area planning. The other thing that they say is that they want to make sure that it's understood that the boundaries that are created through modeling and the final sort of boundaries that you have in your network and marine protected areas should not be static. They should be flexible based on how climate and how the sea surface temperature and just temperature general can change over time because we don't know if it's going to change. So what this, that's essentially what this, the sort of the hypothesis of this paper kind of came out and said, you know, they said, okay, let's look at what kind of data we're looking at. And let's look at the flexibility of boundaries, okay, and that's why we need to be flexible. So what they did is they went out and they gathered and collated a lot of temperature data. So they did a historical data set, which was basically temperature data set. And then for the Brazil, for Brazil, because that was a, they chose Brazil because it was an area where there was a sort of a need or an interest in protecting in the Atlantic. So they chose that area and it was also high in temperature. So they put together a data set, a historical data set, and then they put together a predicted future data set. And then they use those data sets to map out spatially and temporarily the differences in temperature as well as sort of marine protected area plans. Now I want to read you a couple of things off this site because it was really cool and to really understand how temperature affects or how climate change affects declines in coral reefs. So since here it starts off, it says several factors are thought to be responsible for declines in coral reefs worldwide based on climate change, including elevated sea surface temperature, sea level rise, effects of reef calcification and solar radiation. Increases in sea surface increases in sea temperature have led to shifts in species phenologies, rates of production, reproductive success, metabolic rates, and geographic ranges. There have also been substantial shifts in the abundance and composition of coral communities affected by bleaching events. In combination with more localized stresses such as over-efficient and degraded water quality, unprecedented thermal stress impacts could undermine significant investments in protection of coral reefs over recent decades. So that's a lot of changes in coral reefs which are very sensitive habitat in general. So when you have climate change that can affect in such a wide array, if you're doing marine and protected area planning for coral reefs, you want to make sure that you incorporate these changes because if you don't, all that planning could be for not, right? So other things that I wanted to read out, one other thing I wanted to read out is this paragraph here, just bear with me here, reef building corals are particularly vulnerable to rising sea surface temperatures or sea temperatures and are among the most sensitive organisms to climate change. Corals under the temperature stress lose the ability to synthesize, synthesize protective sunscreens, making them more sensitive to sunlight. In addition to reef building corals have relatively long generation times and low genetic diversity, a combination that slows adaptation to environmental changes. Although adaptive responses to thermal stress could increase with global warming, with climate warming, adaptive capacity might include shift to symbiont species with a higher thermal tolerances, which can still be considered a kind of reef degradation. Okay, so that's just a couple of clips or readings that I want to read out to you, but it just goes to show how vulnerable these coral reefs are to just a one degree increase in temperature. They're already living close to their thermal limits and it's important that we make sure that when we do conservation planning, that we actually plan for climate change. So like I said before, what the study did is they actually mapped out the historical and future predictions of climate temperatures based on predictive models and they detailed it out here and like I said, you can look at on the show notes of what they have. What they noticed overall is that one, mapping out these areas really show where the thermal, where it really heats up and where it doesn't. And that should be incorporated in where you plan your marine protected areas. I'm just gonna take a drink, sorry, bear with me. So that should incorporate, because it makes sense. You don't want to put a marine protected area where there's going to be a high temperature. We want to put it in where there's going to be a low temperature normally or not something significantly above what it's supposed to be. Because then you know that the MPA's are gonna be in a higher or the habitat is gonna be in a higher stress level. Now with that said, you may also want to have stringent, you may also want to make that a marine protected area, but have stringent restrictions on there where you can't do any human impact to allow that habitat to recoup from those higher temperatures. So with the ability to map out those areas and really predict what's gonna happen in those areas, you can actually say, hey, that MPA can actually be okay if we take out all the fishing and all the tourism, but just leave it. And in cases when there's high temperature, it'll have an event, it'll hopefully won't be prolonged, but it'll have an event and maybe a bleaching event or something, but maybe it'll recoup afterwards because there's gonna be, there's not gonna be anything else affecting it. It'll have that ability to adapt, which corals have done for millions of years. So that's one way of looking at it. Now, the next thing to look at is what if those temperatures change in spatial time, right? Or in space. So what happens if those temperatures shift upwards or shift lower? So the high temperatures move from where that original protected area where you know there's gonna have a high temperature, what if that moves to a different location? We don't know the spatial trend of what's gonna happen, right? We're all working on predictive models and we don't know what's gonna happen over time, how that's gonna shift. So what they're saying is that what the authors are saying in this study is that we need to have those, those marine protectors have to be have flexible boundaries to move around so that we can incorporate climate change, temperature increase in no sea surface temperature areas. I like the idea of that. Everything should be flexible. However, that's a huge problem. If you think about the way marine protectors are designed now, lock goes into it. There's a lot of stakeholders involved, there's a lot of people involved, a lot of people are for it, a lot of people are against it. And that's went with a static boundary. Imagine with a flexible boundary. I can see a big problem in people saying, hey, I don't want to move this boundary because that's where all the fish are. That's where the fish have been. And if a fisherman comes in, I want to fish there, but now I can't because all of a sudden you want to move your boundaries like magic. Well, I can see that point, I can see that happening. And unfortunately, I think if you follow the data, I think it'll be better, it'll be better evidence to say, hey, wait a minute, there's higher temperatures in these areas, you're not going to be able to fish very long anyway, because the fish aren't going to be there because it's not going to be a habitat if you keep fishing there and so forth. So we're going to move those boundaries over. So you're going to get a lot of more conflicts within the stakeholder process and the planning process, but I think with the evidence that you have and the predictability, I think you can make a very good case for it. So anyway, that's the study that I thought would be kind of cool today to look after, especially we've been covering climate a lot this week, I thought it would be kind of cool to continue that and it'd be, you know, it's a lot of fun. So I'm going to put that article on the show notes at speakupforblue.com/session124. 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So thank you for listening, continue listening, continue sharing, the message and the podcast and so forth. And you've been listening to the Speakup for Blue podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Happy Thursday and happy conservation. [Music]