How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 115: Quantifying Multiple Stressors For More Effective Marine Protected Areas
On Research Thursdays today, I talk about a study that focuses on quantifying multiple threats to the environment on a local scale instead of using expert opinion. The authors say the latter method tends to under- or over-estimate the true effect, which can affect the effectiveness of the Marine Protected Area.
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http://www.speakupforblue.com/session115
Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue podcast session 115 Hi, my name is Andrew Luhan, and it's been four days since my last recording Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue podcast helping you get involved in ocean conservation And now here's your host can't get the song bad blood out of his head Andrew Luhan I am your host Andrew Luhan founder of Speak Up for Blue dot com or any colleges and self-proclaimed Ocean printer and possibly addicted to podcasting because it has been four days since I've last podcasted and I missed it so much I'm used to recording one, you know, every couple of days sometimes one a day And it was just it was killing me. I went on a little bit of a vacation with the family just overnight But it's been four days since my last recording and now I've finally gotten back into it And I'm very very happy and to discover now when I came back I've got some technical issues that I have to sort out and maybe have to buy a new computer ouch But anyway, we'll worry about that when that time comes. Thank you very much for joining us today I really appreciate it. This is me trying to really spread the ocean conservation message And it's something that I love to do. I love to talk about the ocean I live in Ontario, Canada if you don't know who I am or what we do here on this podcast I like to check in every once in a while to get our new listeners our new audience members because we're growing so much Just to get me used to get you used to what I like to do I like to talk about the ocean I like talk about conservation I like giving solutions on what we can do to help You know eliminate or reduce some of these ocean issues that we see today And I really like talking about ocean science and that's what we're going to do today because today is Research Thursdays and that's where I pick a journal that I like that I'm interested in and I talk about it here on the podcast for you know 10 15 20 minutes or so depending on how long I go But let's get into today's episode because it's kind of an interesting one the the the title I got this off this journal off of PLOS 1 in the marine conservation section this one It's a long title so bear with me the challenge of planning conservation strategies in Threatened seascapes colon Understanding the role of fine-scale assessments of community response to cumulative human pressures now Tell me if that is not an enticing title to an article These it seems like these authors are from Italy and perhaps around The I'm just looking at the about the authors here, which is great. They have it on PL so one Yeah, they're mostly from Italy department of biological environmental sciences and technology at University of Cilento And yeah, so it's it's based the the the study areas based in the Mediterranean It's actually on the heel of the boot that you see in Italy and it's it's quite interesting It was published just recently February 12 2016 so it's it's right out of hot off the presses hot off the digital presses This article is and essentially what it is that the gist of the article I'm not gonna go into full details But what they wanted to do is really look at how do a do we plan? Marine protected areas effectively right we see marine protected areas being You know being designated all over the world a lot of them are touting Oh, this is the largest protected area in the world this is the second largest protected area in the world this will solve all our problems and this will solve all our problems and You know the media likes to kind of make it a bigger deal than it actually is and and and to be honest anything as designated as a marine protected area is great, but they all have their goals and Some are more effective than others and what the authors here are looking at is how really do you measure? the effectiveness of This type of of action right of designated a marine protected areas and and and really what you know when you look at effective strategies What do you look at and threaten seascapes? How do you measure the multiple effects at different scales and normally what's happened is? what the authors are trying to highlight is the problem is you get a lot of people bring giving expert opinions on what's happening on a local scale and unfortunately that local scale may over represent or under represent what's actually happening in That area, which doesn't give you an accurate perception of what's happening So what these authors did is they want to prove that notion and they went out and they said okay what we're going to be doing is we're going to be looking at a Small section of coastline 40 kilometers of coastline in a marine protected area the marine protected area is called Let me just get this It's a marine protected area of Porto Caesario southwest Appula, Italy and as it was established in 1997 the comprises of sites of community importance aimed to regulate multiple human pressures on Postadina postadonia Oceanica, which is seagrass meadows. It's a critical habitat for the for the EU habitats directive so They're looking at this marine protected area and they're really assessing threats because what no matter what's happening They're looking at Why there's still threats occurring and what is really driving these threats? What are we looking at? What's you know, what are the what are the main tests that are really driving the biodiversity driving? What the seagrass metals are looking like in these areas? So the whole study was to quantify that so they use a series of statistics and modeling In this area the apula Italy area and the Ionian Sea And they looked at a very small scale and so they looked at a lot of different things They looked at the shoreline. They use GIS, which was kind of cool because I'm a GIS person So they digitized the shoreline. They looked at what the water quality was. They looked at the harbor. There's a harbor present They looked at rock damage due to date muscle collection They looked at or some of the other threats here. I'm trying to see what are the threats sandy coasts Harbor like I said before Water quality was a big one a lot of nutrients and sewage coming in What's DW? There's another one? DW is muscle so date muscle collection water quality And the water quality was derived from available data on fecal contamination of coastal waters yuck, so that's E. coli basically What else so yeah, so we had a bunch of things like that. So yeah urbanization agriculture and It was interesting because the results so they they put that all into a model Sort of like a mixed model and said okay You know, let's let's look at what the biological community looks like in these areas along this 40 kilometer area And let's see if we can really separate out the biological community See if they're different along this 40 kilometer area and then let's see if we can find out why they're different So they did that and they noticed that there was a difference. There's really three separate areas that were different and Oh, sorry. There were more than that. Sorry One two three four five five areas Let me just make sure though Sorry, there's six sectors Okay, and they all had differences now these differences were essentially related to Sorry, I just want to make sure I'm right here Sorry Okay So there were combinations There were different threat combinations and The threat combinations were really separated by early distinguished by three different threats the distance from the harbor water quality and the extension of sandy shores and They all were best explained the differences in assemblages associated To just the distinct threat combinations. Okay consistently in both different types of habitats Suggesting that harbor activity sewage discharge and alteration of sediment regimes, which was the sandy coast Maybe the main drivers of change over and beyond the general pressure related to urbanization and Cultivated areas which is which is agriculture now they mentioned that urbanized areas and and agriculture may not have been a big effect in that 40 kilometer stretch because They're the urbanized areas weren't very big and so they may not have an effect So it wasn't a large city that would have an effect on the coast and the agriculture areas were mostly artisanal agriculture So it wasn't like these big factory farms, so they're not pumping out a lot of nutrients So that also plays a role in what happens So the big thing is here is they're saying that you know a lot of people might just say oh well You know you're looking at the coast you're seeing a lot of urbanization you're seeing agriculture You can explain a lot of times like say here in Ontario that would be a big thing in southern Ontario where I live Because the urbanized centers are big cities. You know you've got Toronto, which is you know five million you've got You know Hamilton you've got Oakville Burlington all between there You've got a lot of a densely populated area along the coastline of Lake Ontario that can play a big factor and urbanization or agriculture is bigger farms that are in the area although they're reducing here But they're bigger farms than it would be on a coast line like this. They're not artisanal farms anymore So you'll see a you know less of a change Or less of a change in those two categories So but what what normally people see is they see those you see urbanization you see agriculture and they're right off the bat They're ready to say the expert opinion would be those would probably be the two main drivers when you had a lot of you know the distance from the harbor water quality and Extension of sandy shores, which is essentially coastal alteration Played a bigger factor when you looked at the quantitative data So the big lesson here is when you actually look at putting together effective spatial planning you will require Quantitative studies you may not always get quantitative studies, but you'll require quite a bit more effective if you have quantitative studies Now, what does this mean data takes a lot of time? Effort and money to collect. So what does this mean? The way I see it in the future is I see a lot more citizen science programs to help collect this data Right, you need to collect this quantitative data You need to do more like reef surveys Seagrass surveys mangrove surveys to look at these coastal areas and make sure that they're managed properly Let's look at where the drivers are so we make sure that we when we protect When we designate marine protected areas and we protect habitats marine habitats We're doing them properly and we're protecting them against the right things that will Dictate where they're placed how they're arranged and what we're protecting and how we're enforcing it So those are the big things that really come out of this study It's and it's something that I thought was was pretty cool to see is Let's not disregard the science. Let's not disregard the math and the quantitative analysis that we do here I know it's low-hanging fruit to use You know qualitative analysis like by looking at expert opinion and it helps when you're looking at the overall analysis and it's nice to have anecdotal Information, however, the quantitative information is where it's at. That's what we need to do and I like this study for that So that's the take-home message today is really when we look at marine protected areas Especially on a local scale you really want to look at what's affecting the local habitat the diversity What's affecting the driver? What are the drivers in affecting that change and if it's human change? How do we how do we get rid of it? You know, how do we control it? How do we regulate it usually through marine protected areas and enforcement and in fact on local areas? It should be easier something close to the coast. It should be easier to enforce because people can see what's happening if it's water quality Alteration of sea shore that can really be regulated fairly easily and enforced because a change like that would be huge And it'd be easily detectable and easily measurable. So that is this episode for today. Not a long one We're gonna put links up to all of our to the journals Which you can get free access to if you want to read of yourself, and you can do so at www.speakupforblue.com forward slash session 1 1 5 1 15 Okay, and if you want to support our podcast you want to support the team that I have with myself Nate and Kate we We are working hard to spread the ocean conservation message in the pot within the podcast community And we want to do it in other platforms as well and what we're doing is we're running a crowdfunding campaign through patreon.com That where you can donate or you can support us on a monthly basis if you like what we do So you can do so at speak up for blue dot com for slash patreon P A T R E O N and it would be greatly appreciate if you can put in a value per month And that's how you can support this podcast support our ocean conservation message and support the oceans in general So if you're looking for something to do you can support our podcast by going to speak up for blue dot com For slash patreon P A T R E O N. Thank you very much for listening You've been listening to speak up for blue podcast. I'm your host Angelouin. Happy Thursday and happy conservation [Music]