A Q&A with Christopher Free, the lead author of the new paper ‘If you build it, they will come – coastal amenities facilitate human engagement with marine protected areas’.
Read the full paper discussed here in our Open Access journal.
Read the Plain Language Summary for this paper at Relational Thinking.
What was the inspiration for this article?
Many marine protected areas (MPAs) around the world aim to facilitate recreational, educational, and scientific engagement in marine ecosystems, yet human engagement in MPAs has received little attention in the scientific literature. We sought to fill this gap by developing a transferable workflow for documenting human engagement in MPAs and for identifying traits of MPAs associated with high and low engagement. This knowledge is critical to designing MPA networks that are effective in achieving both their human use and conservation goals. We focus on California’s MPA network given that promoting recreational, educational, and scientific engagement in marine ecosystems is an explicit goal of the network, which is currently undergoing a legislatively mandated decadal performance review. Thus, the paper also provides a basis for benchmarking the success of the network in achieving its human engagement goals and for informing adaptive management to better achieve these goals in the coming decade.
How does your article inform future research?
Our paper sets the stage for future research into human engagement in MPAs. We focus on California, but our methods draws on human engagement indicators that are globally relevant, and could be used to document human engagement in other MPA networks around the world. Our paper also reveals critical next steps through what it was unable to address. While we were successful in documenting the magnitude of human engagement in MPAs, we were unable to discern the demographics of people engaged in these activities, precluding us from understanding the equity of MPA access and engagement. Furthermore, lack of data on the engagement of indigenous people with MPAs limited the types of cultural values we could evaluate. Future work into the equity of MPA engagement and cultural value of MPAs to indigenous people will be critical to designing fair and effective MPA networks.
Why did you choose People and Nature for your research?
We choose People and Nature because our research explicitly examines how people (People) interact with marine protected areas (Nature) and how MPA networks can be designed to either enhance or limit such engagement based on network objectives. We value the high-quality synthetic science published in People and Nature and the journal’s commitment to open-access.
Read the full paper discussed here in our Open Access journal.
Read the Plain Language Summary for this paper at Relational Thinking.
Relational Thinking 