Scientific approaches for protecting marine biodiversity in an era of increasing anthropogenic stressors

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Conservation is increasingly necessary and urgent in this era of accelerating human impacts on marine biodiversity. My research contributes to the scientific field of conservation science and systematic conservation planning. My research group's long-term objective is to understand marine resilience and develop the scientific approaches and methodologies to protect marine biodiversity in an era of increasing and dynamic threats. The early focus of conservation planning was on protecting patterns of biodiversity (e.g., by mapping distributions of species and then protecting a portion of their ranges), but the realization that biodiversity patterns are not static especially with climate change and shifting human uses has resulted in growing emphasis on techniques for analyzing and incorporating dynamic biodiversity processes, functions, and threats into conservation planning. The research outlined in this proposal will begin to address the many gaps that remain in assessing the ecological effectiveness of current and novel marine biodiversity conservation strategies in the face of change. ******Over the next five years, my short-term objective is to study the ecological effectiveness of different approaches to protecting and adaptively managing marine biodiversity while maintaining ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change and other dynamic threats. ******Three interlinked research projects at global, regional, and local scales will allow my research group to achieve the short-term objective and work towards the long-term objective: ***(1) Assess the global ecological effectiveness of different marine protected area (MPA) protection levels at maintaining ecosystem resilience in the face of dynamic threats through a meta-analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) approach; ***(2) Innovate regional conservation planning and management methods to incorporate dynamic stressors and processes when data are limited using the Northern Shelf Bioregion MPA planning process as a case study; and ***(3) Assess options for improving local marine resilience through active management by investigating the effect of Indigenous management on ecological community composition and biomass.******This research is novel in that we aim to develop and test new strategies for MPA planning in the face of accelerating global change. The research is necessary as it will inform effective marine conservation strategies to enable the federal government to work towards its international commitments to protect 10% of Canada's oceans. This work is applied and grounded in collaborations with federal, provincial, and First Nations governments, with whom we will develop relevant guidance for MPA planners and practitioners for addressing climate change and dynamic threats in MPA planning, and inform active management options. My research is also training the next generation of conservation scientists, as well as exposing them to policy, planning, and management in practice.