Data for: A tide of change – what we can learn from stories of marine conservation success
Data files
Apr 06, 2023 version files 164.02 KB
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ATideOfChange_AllData.xlsx
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README.md
Abstract
Rapid deterioration of marine habitats and biodiversity under cumulative stressors have led to increased efforts to rebuild marine life. Yet, successes of such endeavors do not have prominent visibility in recent assessments, although these examples are particularly needed to guide future actions to achieve our shared aspiration of a healthy ocean. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessment of 217 verified marine conservation successes across the world’s oceans and the main traits involved. Our findings reveal a balanced geography of success across the world’s oceans and that human stewardship is essential for driving conservation success, especially when different stakeholders work together in rebuilding marine life. This assessment should inform future actions and build confidence that reversing the trajectory of loss towards repairing ocean health is feasible. It also provides a basis for a ‘learning by doing’ approach in guiding conservation success through an understanding of the levers for success versus failure.
Methods
Retrieval of relevant reports
For this dataset, the reports on marine conservation successes, which caused a significant positive change of an ecosystem component towards a previously documented state, were drawn from different sources (i.e., peer-reviewed publications, proceedings, dissertations, books, technical reports, popular science magazines, and grey literature).
For the geographically-distributed search we used various combinations of the keywords ‘recovery’ AND/OR ‘stock increase’ AND/OR ‘population increase’ together with keywords for the respective, different ocean components (such as ‘reef’, ‘mangrove’, or ‘whale’) to retrieve relevant reports from the major literature databases, i.e., Web-of- Science, Google Scholar, JSTOR, PubMed and ScienceDirect. In addition, we used the ‘snowball’ sampling approach, where we manually searched the reference lists of the relevant publications on marine conservation successes to retrieve additional sources. We also further used a stratified search approach and distributed the search efforts across continents/regions among the contributing authors (e.g., North America, South America, Europe, South-East Asia, Australia and Micronesia, open ocean). This review does not aim to be exhaustive, as a formal meta-analysis aims at resolving metrics such as effect size, requiring complete experimental designs, but to identify levers of success and initiate a repository where future marine conservation and restoration successes can be reported by others.
Pooling of conservation successes on related recovery efforts or locations
As a number of the search results reported on the same recovery effort or location (e.g., from different years or different habitats or species, but reported for the same location or population), these cumulative mitigation efforts were pooled here as a joint success case. These conservation successes were then categorized by having an influence on a local (i.e., distinct area, such as a specific bight, estuary, reef, or national park), regional (i.e., involving a broader area, such as a long stretch of coastline, or across national borders, as well if the action taken for recovery has an impact beyond a specific area), or basin level (i.e., conservation successes involving highly migratory species, such as cetaceans or sea turtles, and when impacts of recovery spread over a large area, often an entire ocean basin).
Categorization of conservation successes
We further categorized conservation successes into different ecosystems, habitats, or for marine taxa. This included different benthic, faunal habitats (i.e., benthic communities, coral reefs, and bivalve beds), vegetated coastal habitats (i.e., seagrass meadows, macroalgae stands, mangroves, and salt marshes), as well as different groups of marine megafauna (i.e., sea turtles, whales, seals, and other marine mammals), fishes (i.e., bony and cartilaginous), but also general improvements of the water quality (e.g., levels of specific organic and inorganic pollutants, or reduced eutrophication). The identified stressor(s) causing the initial habitat degradation or decline in species were also categorized and included overexploitation (e.g., harvesting/hunting, unregulated fishing or deforestations), pollution (e.g., through chemicals, unregulated wastewater discharges, and oil spills), and other human disturbances (e.g., construction, sand extraction, dynamite fishing), and as well as climate change related pressures (e.g., high water temperatures and storm events).
Consideration of socioeconomic zones
Furthermore, we grouped the success cases according to the socioeconomic zones, for which the conservation success was reported. These socioeconomic regions comprised the High-Income region (including Northern America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand), Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, as well as the East Asian / Pacific region. This division of the world countries into socioeconomic regions by Morales-Caselles et al. 2021 included different geographical, cultural, and economic criteria (such as the Gross Domestic Product with a GDP constant in US$ averaged for the years 2010-2016). Since the number of reported conservation successes varied between the socioeconomic regions, we calculated the percent contribution of the respective pressure (e.g., harvesting/fishing or pollution) to the overall pressures in that specific region. Thereby, we identified the socioeconomic region-specific stressors that initially led to a population decline or habitat degradation.
Consideration of involved stakeholders
Lastly, conservation successes were categorized according to the stakeholders that were
involved in the recovery efforts, such as governments (through legislation, legal protection), industry (either direct – when actions taken were directly targeted to improve the ecosystem, or indirect when the recovery was just a byproduct), NGOs, local communities (e.g., local fishermen or citizen groups), or scientists, as well as natural, unassisted recovery. When retrieving the actors involved, this reflected those credited with delivering the success, which may or may not have been the project initiators.