Assessing Capacity for Climate-Driven Evolution with MPAs
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are an important tool used for species conservation. By limiting (or removing) fishing within their boundaries, MPAs can allow species and ecosystems to recover. Due to this protection from fishing, MPAs can also impact the way species evolve within their borders. At the same time, climate change is also driving the evolution of key species traits, such as thermal tolerance and species movement extents, further affecting species population recovery and persistence within MPAs and susceptibility to fishing near MPA borders. The selective pressures from protection and climate change can interact and sometimes be contradictory. This can lead to unexpected consequences, sometimes positive or negative, for some species protected within MPAs, while other species will continue to benefit from protection as predicted.
Allie and Addison addressed key open questions including, (a) when does climate change reverse evolutionary outcomes present in MPAs and (b) which species and regions may experience these unanticipated effects? Via literature and data synthesis efforts, they identified key traits that undergo selective pressure from climate-driven evolution within MPAs and classifying them as positive or negative for the species. Then, they identified which species and regions globally are most likely to experience unanticipated responses to make management and design recommendations.
Preliminary results show that traits in four key categories (thermotolerance, reproduction, size and growth, and movement) undergo evolution due to climate and that there are both positive and negative outcomes to this but revealed gaps in understanding the full range of interactions between protected and climate change. Reproduction and movement, in particular, evolve with positive effects in the absence of climate change, but climate-driven evolution leads to negative effects within MPAs such as increased competition within MPAs and reduced ability to track climate change. Phase two of the project will apply this to MPAs global to determine which regions are at most risk for these contradictory evolutionary effects.
Addison and Allie’s Impacts:
- Conducted a literature review, narrowing 1,502 papers down to 18 relevant papers that explored the impact of evolution from climate change within MPAs
- Defined four key traits that climate change impacts within MPAs: thermotolerance, reproduction, size and growth, and movement
- Determined if MPA and climate change had contradictory effects on the traits based on analysis of literature
- Presented preliminary results for a public audience at Bren
- Began drafting a manuscript for publication based on the literature review results
- Collected data on sea surface temperature velocity
