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Chapter 1: What are Marine Protected Areas and why are they important?
On Wednesday, he spoke at that Fair Seas Conference in Cork's City Hall. The whole day was about the need for marine protected areas, ideally the same amount as others are committing to, 30 by 30, 30% of our waters by 2030. A marine protected area either totally excludes or limits human activity, mostly bottom trawling, so it's not without controversy in the fishing community.
But does it actually work? If you leave an area damaged by bottom trawling and pollution undisturbed, will it restore itself? Dr Ben Harris has just completed a detailed study of the marine protected area off the Isle of Arran in Scotland to see what, if any, recovery had taken place there.
The MPA has been campaigning for some time and that's been driven mainly by a community group called the Community of Arran Seabed Trust. So a nice, neat acronym COAST. Yeah, and they've been kind of instrumental in having the MPA set up and monitoring and managing it since its implementation in 2014. 2014.
Chapter 2: How does the Isle of Arran MPA serve as a case study?
So we've had 10 years of fishing activity been excluded then. How hardcore was it? What kind of activity is and isn't allowed?
So on the very inside of the MPA, adjacent to the coast, it's essentially no fishing at all. There's some small patches of lobster pots which are allowed. There's a small section by a little area called Holy Isle, which is actually a no-take zone. It's basically the most extreme form of protection you can have.
And then moving slightly further out, trawling is still permitted, but you are not allowed to dredge. So for things like scallops and things like that, that's banned. So it's a slightly different type of impacts in the seabed.
Chapter 3: What restrictions are in place within the MPA?
And then outside of that, it's basically fair game, dredging, trawling, whatever you like. So there's a bit of a gradient kind of moving away from the coast of very, very high protection to no protection at all. And that's part of the reason why we're interested to sort of study that gradient, see changes in biodiversity and organic carbon storage along that gradient. So what did you find then?
So after some scientific wizardry by clever statisticians, we basically found that as you move outwards away from the MPA, we find much less animals in the seabed. Those animals are important for storing that carbon and a significantly more amount of animals and a greater diversity of animals living in the sediment.
And as I said before, that's important because those animals have a big role to play in turning over that carbon, burying it deeper into the sediment and storing it for long periods of time.
Presumably these smaller animals living in and on top of the sediment are pretty important building blocks in the food chain. How important do you think that they're likely to be in returning other species to that area?
Chapter 4: What findings emerged from the study of biodiversity in the MPA?
Yeah, for sure. So this is an interesting kind of discussion that came out of the paper that It's been over 10 years of protection. And the only really signal that we saw in terms of biodiversity change was from the animals living in the seabed. So these small worms and crustaceans and shell-building animals, snails and things like that, they are the kind of first rung of the ladder of recovery.
So it's a much slower rate of recovery that we'd expect from other areas in the ocean. So a lot of other NPAs have been built around focus on fisheries, open water systems where recovery is quite quick. Looking at these soft, sudden, muddy environments on the seabed, it looks like the kind of metabolic rate is much, much slower. The recovery rate is much, much slower.
But it was nice to see that initial signal of these small critters living in the seabed recovering.
Chapter 5: How do small organisms contribute to ecosystem recovery?
And as you say, it's likely that they're kind of facilitating over time other species then to come in and recover. And eventually that will work its way up the food chain, so we see recovery in fish stocks and things like that as well.
So as they sort of modify the sediment, they allow what we call epifauna, so that's stuff growing out of the sediment, things like sponges and corals, things like that that can grow out of the sediment. facilitate those. And then as you go further along in time, that will then bring in vertebrate communities, more lobsters, fish, things like that. And then you move up the food chain that way.
So that is kind of what we call sort of an ecological succession. And these are the real pioneering species that facilitate that succession over time.
So should I take away from this then that if you have a very seriously degraded marine ecosystem, if you remove all fishing activity, life will return within that 10 year timeframe anyway, those building blocks of life will return, if not all of the species that you'd like to see.
Chapter 6: Do Marine Protected Areas effectively restore marine life?
Yeah, I mean, that is the message. I think the important caveat here is that, as I mentioned before, time is a really, really big feature here and context. So in certain areas, it might be that they recover really, really quickly and you leave it for a couple of years and suddenly your fish stocks come back and you see this big sort of boom in biodiversity.
It might be that in other areas, it's much, much slower. And I think that's going to be the case for a lot of these soft sediment environments, especially around the UK where they're a bit deeper and a bit darker. The kind of metabolic rate of that environment is quite slow. But given enough time, they will recover.
But if I was to be really reductive about this and very, very un-nuanced, would it be correct for me to say that marine protected areas, excluding all activity, do restore life?
That's certainly true. We know marine protected areas work. We know from multiple contexts, multiple places around the world, that they work, yes. And some might take longer than others.
marine scientist Ben Harris with a pretty unequivocal message.
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