Integrating diverse data to effectively manage Marine Protected Areas

Successful marine protected areas (MPAs) need to fulfill a wide range of functions, from protecting ecological indicators such as fish stocks or biodiversity through to maintaining stakeholder engagement and ensuring... [ view full abstract ]

Successful marine protected areas (MPAs) need to fulfill a wide range of functions, from protecting ecological indicators such as fish stocks or biodiversity through to maintaining stakeholder engagement and ensuring sufficient economic benefit can be obtained from the MPA and surrounding area. These functions are multidisciplinary, and in many cases can be antagonistic in nature.

Data to support scientific and management decisions come in a wide variety of formats, from conclusive outcomes of rigorous meta-analysis at one end of the scale, to anecdotal stories from local fishers at the other. Integrating multiple data sources to provide interdisciplinary information in a manner transparent manner to stakeholders may therefore seem an impossible challenge, yet through the proposed demonstration, I will present a series of online tools and tutorials which will allow these outcomes to be achieved. 

The core of the data processing comes from a downloadable Microsoft Excel Template, with VBA coding to produce a powerful Bayesian belief network suitable for understanding complex socio-ecological systems. The demonstration will explain how the model works, how models can be constructed and how results can be interpreted and understood. This brief overview will provide awareness of what the model can achieve, however, the online resources (available at MPAmanagement.net) also provide a full and comprehensive set of tutorials related to topics such as finding relevant data, assigning confidence of data, constructing the models, and communicating the results to stakeholders – all of which is freely available to use.