Why are Marine Protected Areas so relevant to our project?

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are patches of the ocean where fishing activities have been reduced or eliminated, thus offering us the rare opportunity to investigate how marine species and communities develop in a more natural, near pristine state.

There is widespread evidence of the benefits of MPAs in terms of increased biomass, abundance and diversity of organisms within their boundaries. Most of this evidence comes from tropical latitudes, where many long-term monitoring programs and MPA assessments have been conducted in the past. In comparison, MPAs located in higher-latitude temperate ecosystems have been less well studied, leading to speculation about their usefulness as a conservation and management tool in colder waters.

In the Codchange project we will use MPAs as control sites to investigate the impact of fisheries on temperate coastal environments, and we will do so by analyzing data from long-term studies conducted in a network of MPAs in Skagerrak, offering different levels of protection from fisheries (from full to partial protection). Previous studies analyzing part of these data have revealed that not all MPAs are the same and that the size of the MPA, the type and quality of the habitat included within it, and even the level of fishing pressure in its surroundings all may influence the performance of MPAs as a tool for the conservation of marine biodiversity. However, in all the assessed MPAs, even the smaller ones or those offering only partial protection from fisheries, demographic benefits in the form of improved survival of large-sized individuals were recorded. Those previous results confirmed the potential of MPAS as a tool for rebuilding the size structure of harvested populations of target species in Skagerrak, namely coastal Atlantic cod and European lobster.

We are looking forward to novel results from the CodChange project on the effects of fisheries vs. protection on individual traits, mortality hazard rates and community dynamics!