Papers by Kelly Haisfield
Generating actionable data for evidence-based conservation: The global center of marine biodiversity as a case study
Biological Conservation
How Are Our MPAs Doing? Challenges in Assessing Global Patterns in Marine Protected Area Performance
Explaining global patterns and trends in marine protected area (MPA) development
Marine Policy, 2012
Explaining global patterns and trends in marine protected area (MPA) development
Marine Policy, 2012
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 08920753 2014 904178, May 1, 2014
Without effective management, protected areas are unlikely to achieve the high expectations the c... more Without effective management, protected areas are unlikely to achieve the high expectations the conservation and development sectors have for them: conserving biodiversity and alleviating poverty. Numerous marine protected area (MPA) assessment initiatives have been developed at various spatial and temporal scales, including the guidebook How is your MPA doing? These management assessments have been useful to sites to clarify and evaluate their objectives, yet efforts to examine broader regional or global patterns in MPA performance are only beginning. The authors conducted exploratory trend analyses on How is your MPA doing? indicator data collected by 24 MPAs worldwide to identify challenges and areas for future work. Wide variability across sites with regard to the indicators examined and the constructs used to measure them prevented a true meta-analysis. Managers assessed biophysical indicators more often than socioeconomic and governance constructs. Investment by the conservation community to support collecting and reporting high-quality data at the site level would enable a better understanding of the variation in MPA performance, clarify the contribution of MPAs to both biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation, and help drive better MPA performance. The absence of rigorous and consistent monitoring protocols and instruments and a platform to turn raw MPA monitoring data into actionable information is a critical but under-recognized obstacle to cross-project learning, comparative analyses, and adaptive resource management.
Explaining global patterns and trends in marine protected area (MPA) development
Without effective management, protected areas are unlikely to achieve the high expectations the c... more Without effective management, protected areas are unlikely to achieve the high expectations the conservation and development sectors have for them: conserving biodiversity and alleviating poverty. Numerous marine protected area (MPA) assessment initiatives have been developed at various spatial and temporal scales, including the guidebook How is your MPA doing? These management assessments have been useful to sites to clarify and evaluate their objectives, yet efforts to examine broader regional or global patterns in MPA performance are only beginning. The authors conducted exploratory trend analyses on How is your MPA doing? indicator data collected by 24 MPAs worldwide to identify challenges and areas for future work. Wide variability across sites with regard to the indicators examined and the constructs used to measure them prevented a true meta-analysis. Managers assessed biophysical indicators more often than socioeconomic and governance constructs. Investment by the conservation community to support collecting and reporting high-quality data at the site level would enable a better understanding of the variation in MPA performance, clarify the contribution of MPAs to both biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation, and help drive better MPA performance. The absence of rigorous and consistent monitoring protocols and instruments and a platform to turn raw MPA monitoring data into actionable information is a critical but under-recognized obstacle to cross-project learning, comparative analyses, and adaptive resource management.
Explaining global patterns and trends in marine protected area (MPA) development
Marine Policy, 2012
Marine Ecology Progress Series, 2012
Larval fish recruitment is generally highly variable in space and time, and can significantly inf... more Larval fish recruitment is generally highly variable in space and time, and can significantly influence adult population abundance, density and distribution, as well as community structure in coral reef systems. We investigated relationships between reef fish recruitment (data from the West Hawai'i Aquarium Project) and oceanographic and meteorological variables (measures of eddy presence and frequency, El Niño Southern Oscillation, sea surface temperature, sea surface height, chlorophyll a concentration and rainfall). We compared these variables at different time scales -monthly and annually -to substantiate 1 of 3 possible hypotheses about the relationship between eddies and other oceanographic features and fish recruitment: (1) they are positively correlated, indicating that eddy activity could enhance recruitment; (2) they are negatively correlated, indicating that eddy activity may reduce or inhibit recruitment; and (3) they are not correlated, indicating that eddy activity has no impact on recruitment. We found several potential linkages generally supporting the hypothesis that eddies negatively correlate with fish recruitment. In contrast to previous work, we found significant negative correlations in annual patterns of cold-core mesoscale eddies and young-of-the-year totals on the west coast of the island of Hawai'i. We also investigated time lags between monthly recruitment data and oceanographic data several months earlier, consistent with planktonic larval duration of Zebrasoma flavescens and Ctenochaetus strigosus; these phase shifts also produced negative correlations. Our results are exploratory and are only correlations, and thus do not suggest causation; further exploration is needed to substantiate the possibility that eddies have a negative influence on reef fish recruitment. However, these results do call into question that eddies in west Hawai'i have a positive impact on fish recruitment, a theory that has persisted in the literature for nearly 30 yr.
Conservation Letters, 2010
Blast fishing has destroyed many coral reefs in Southeast Asia by creating large fields of dead c... more Blast fishing has destroyed many coral reefs in Southeast Asia by creating large fields of dead coral rubble where new coral recruits settle but cannot survive and grow. Possible management responses include reef rehabilitation of damaged areas, and/or increased enforcement to protect still-living ones.
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Papers by Kelly Haisfield