What Can Large-Scale Marine Protected Areas Protect? Connecting Home Ranges to Species Protection in the New 500,000 km2 Palau National Marine Sanctuary

Allison Dedrick1, Emily Kelly2, Alfredo Giron3, Collin J. Closek4,5, Staci Lewis6, Lucie Hazen6, Eric Henry Hartge2, Yimnang Golbuu7, Jim Leape6 and Fiorenza Micheli8, (1)Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, United States, (2)Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, CA, United States, (3)National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, CA, United States, (4)South Beach, OR, United States, (5)Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States, (6)Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford, CA, United States, (7)Palau International Coral Reef Center, Koror, Palau, (8)Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States
Abstract:
Large-scale marine protected areas (LSMPAs) are often orders of magnitude larger than the median marine protected area (MPA) size. Their large areas encompassing entire ecosystems make it theoretically possible to protect entire populations from extractive human activities. LSMPAs are relatively new, however, and are understudied compared to smaller MPAs. We lack grounded expectations of what they might protect and how they might contribute to conservation globally. We also often have limited data on the species and habitats they contain. Here, we consider select species, such as tuna and sharks, found in the newly established 500,000 km2 Palau National Marine Sanctuary (PNMS) in the western Pacific to explore potential ecological effects of establishing a LSMPA. We compare the home ranges of the species to known occurrences in the PNMS to assess the degree of protection the PNMS provides and set preliminary conservation expectations. To contextualize these results, we compare the relative coverage of home ranges and the PNMS with other MPAs that are home to the same species. We visualize these data through maps and associated graphs highlighting the percentage of home ranges captured by the PNMS as well as the species conservation status.
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