Review
Long-Distance Benefits of Marine Reserves: Myth or Reality?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.01.002Get rights and content

Highlights

Marine dispersal distance estimates are limited by the spatial scale of sampling design and therefore biased downwards.

Active larval behavior, oceanographic eddies and fronts, tsunamis, marine debris, and translocations are potentially important, but overlooked, dispersal vectors over long distances.

The largest marine reserves have the highest potential for massive and long-distance benefits but are the most isolated reserves.

Long-distance dispersal has important consequences for the design of marine reserve networks.

Long-distance (>40-km) dispersal from marine reserves is poorly documented; yet, it can provide essential benefits such as seeding fished areas or connecting marine reserves into networks. From a meta-analysis, we suggest that the spatial scale of marine connectivity is underestimated due to the limited geographic extent of sampling designs. We also found that the largest marine reserves (>1000 km2) are the most isolated. These findings have important implications for the assessment of evolutionary, ecological, and socio-economic long-distance benefits of marine reserves. We conclude that existing methods to infer dispersal should consider the up-to-date genomic advances and also expand the spatial scale of sampling designs. Incorporating long-distance connectivity in conservation planning will contribute to increase the benefits of marine reserve networks.

Section snippets

Benefits from Marine Reserves: Where Are We?

Marine resources are declining at an alarming rate 1, 2, with more than half of the oceanic area exploited by industrial fishing [3]. In response, marine protected areas (MPAs) have been established in an effort to conserve biodiversity and sustain fisheries 4, 5, 6, 7. Yet, only 3.7% of the ocean is presently covered by MPAs and less than 2% by no-take MPAs (referred to as marine reserves [8]) specifically (mpatlas.org; [9]). Despite the recent establishment of large-scale MPAs (>100 000 km2)

Spatial Scale of Dispersal and Connectivity in the Marine Realm: Do We Capture the Full Picture?

We define marine connectivity as the exchange of individuals among marine populations [44]. This exchange can take place through dispersal of individuals as larvae, juveniles, or adults. When individuals reproduce successfully thereafter, demographic connectivity translates into genetic connectivity. Determining the spatial scale of marine connectivity is crucial for our understanding of the population dynamics, genetic structure, and biogeography of marine organisms, and accordingly for the

Long-Distance Benefits of Marine Reserves

We consider a long-distance benefit of a marine reserve any change in biomass, biological processes (e.g., recruitment), or biodiversity (including genetic diversity as raw material for adaptation) at distances greater than 40 km from reserve boundaries that contributes to improve ecosystem function or human livelihoods (e.g., fisheries, tourism, culture) (Figure 2). Long-distance benefits from reserves can occur at different spatial and temporal scales depending on the vector of dispersal (Box 1

Implications of Long-Distance Dispersal for Marine Reserve Design

An underestimate of dispersal ability can profoundly influence the design of marine reserve networks. Long-distance dispersal can potentially connect distant and isolated reserves and sustain biodiversity and biomass in exploited areas located at more than 40 km from their boundaries. In this respect, long-distance dispersal provides a fresh perspective on two long-lasting and active debates in the marine reserve literature.

First, long-distance dispersal has implications for the unresolved

Concluding Remarks

Marine dispersal has been extensively documented at short distance (mostly <40 km). We suggest that this has been due, at least in part, to logistic constraints and a restricted geographic extent of the sampling design (e.g., the median sampling distance in parentage analyses is only 33 km, interquartile range = 29–60 km, number of species = 22). While a significant fraction of dispersal indeed occurs at small spatial scales, the fraction of the dispersal kernel that we are missing is largely unknown

Acknowledgments

This research was funded through the 2015-2016 BiodivERsA COFUND call for research proposals, with the national funders ANR (France), Formas (Sweden), DLR (Germany), AEI (Spain) and the CNRS for the PICS SEACONNECT. C.B. was funded by the German Research Foundation (grant BR 5488/1-1). We thank Pierre Lopez for the Figure 2. We thank Tom Bowling (Biota Aquaculture, Palau) for the pictures used in Figure I in Box 2. We thank David Diaz for helpful discussions. We acknowledge the editor and the

Glossary

Admixture tracts
continuous blocks of the genome inherited from an admixed population.
Benthic species
species that live and feed in or on the seabed.
Blocks of identity by descent
continuous blocks of the genome that share the same alleles inherited from a common ancestor.
Cline analysis
a framework that uses the relation between the genetic variation and the geography or environment to estimate dispersal and selection.
Coalescent theory
a model that traces back gene variants from populations to their

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