A General Approach and Tool to Evaluate the Effectiveness of No-Take Marine Reserves
Channel: OCTO (Open Communications for the Ocean)
Date: 20/09/2017

This webinar originally aired on 20 September 2017.

The benefits of no-take marine reserves - where all extractive activities are off-limits - are well known. While previous works provide a set of indicators to evaluate the performance of marine protected areas, they do not provide guidelines to analyze them nor a user-friendly tool to conduct the evaluation. Over the last year, students from The Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California Santa Barbara collaborated with the Mexican NGO Comunidad y Biodiversidad to provide managers and fishers with tools to evaluate marine reserves taking into account biophysical, socioeconomic, and governance dimensions. An open-source web application called MAREA (Marine Reserve Evaluation App), which automates the evaluation and produces a color-coded scorecard and a technical report was developed from this collaboration. This webinar will cover our general approach for identifying the objectives of a reserve and matching them with proper indicators, describe the analysis that can be performed, and do a demonstration of MAREA.

This webinar was presented by Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez, Caio Faro, Melaina Wright, and Jael Martínez of UCSB. Webinar co-sponsored by the EBM Tools Network (co-coordinated by NatureServe and OpenChannels.org) and MEAM.