Predicting Local Responses to Marine Reserves from Global Evidence

The rapidly increasing interest in using marine reserves as a conservation and resource management tool has been accompanied by increasingly vocal opposition to the idea of reserves. In particular, local and regional efforts to develop networks of marine reserves often face opposition from some stakeholder groups that claim little or no evidence exists to show if reserves will work at a particular location. In this paper I show that many of these perceptions about what we know about how well reserves will work at a particular location are incorrect. Comparisons of reserve effects across broad geographic distributions show surprisingly similar results despite dramatically different biological compositions of the reserves. Therefore, the aggregate within-reserve response can be expected to be similar across a wide range of underlying biological conditions. However, nearly all marine reserves to date have been placed around coral or temperate rocky reef substrate, emphasizing the value of these habitats but suggesting that further research is needed into how organisms in other habitats will respond to reserve protection, particularly for estuarine habitats.