There are over a dozen MPAs in New Zealand which may be of interest to you. the Leigh reserve was one of the first MPAs in the world. 

Just see the Indian Sundarbans' case.

Hi Wolfgang, you might have a look on monitoring of Lyme Bay MPA (the U.K.) here: http://www1.plymouth.ac.uk/research/mberc/Research/Marine%20resource%20management/Pages/Marine%20Protected%20Areas.aspx. There also contact e-mails of persons involved into monitoring on this web page to ask about details.

Hi Nikolaus, not sure if the spatial domain include also the Med (not Temperate, but not Tropical  yet...). Have a look for instance to:

Garcı́a-Charton et al.,  Journal for Nature Conservation 16 (2008) 193—221; 

Guidetti P, Baiata P, Ballesteros E, Di Franco A, Hereu B, Macpherson E, et al. (2014) Large-Scale Assessment of Mediterranean Marine Protected Areas Effects on Fish Assemblages. PLoS ONE 9(4): e91841. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0091841

All the best. Sasa

Hi Wolfgang, with 'good examples' do you mean 'success stories of protection' or do you mean 'just examples of MPAs where fish are protected'?

These cases may be useful to you:

http://www.oceansentry.org/en/1232-argentina-bans-commercial-fishing-to-protect-marine-wildlife.html

http://stage3.fisherieswiki.org/fishery/sustainability_analysis/Environment%20and%20Biodiversity?fishery=Argentine+hake+-+North+of+41%C2%B0S+%5BFIP%3A+Argentine-Uruguayan+Hake%2C+CeDePesca%5D

Hi Samuli,

Good question. I guess I mean good studies which clearly show whether there is an effect or not.

Hi Wolfgang, we have several MPA's/fisheries protection zones in waters around the Isle of Man. Our largest MPA in Ramsey Bay was developed in collaboration with fishermen and has proved to be very successful both from a conservation and fisheries management perspective (I can send some reports if you wish) . Also look into the work that Bryce Stewart and co are doing at York University (Scottish MPAs). There are also examples from Norway.

Best wishes,

Kev

Hi Wolfgang, You might also have a look here :

http://www.parc-marin-iroise.com/

The Iroise Natural Marine Park is in Brittany in France and is therefore in temperate waters.

MPAs have helped the Atlantic Cod population in Norway. This article has the link to the actual journal publication to the left.

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/integration/research/newsalert/pdf/marine_protected_areas_increase_survival_of_atlantic_cod_430na1_en.pdf

As mentioned previously, New Zealand has many MPAs and associated literature such as Willis et al. 2003, Protection of exploited fish in temperate regions: high density and biomass of snapper Pagrus auratus (Sparidae) in northern New Zealand marine reserves. There's also several papers by Nick Shears that may be worth checking out as far as community effects.

There are also MPAs and marine reserves administered through state agencies in the US, such as Washington (http://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/mpa/) and Oregon (http://www.oregonocean.info/index.php/marine-reserves-sp-26120). They likely have monitoring plans and associated reports, so may be worth reaching out.

Nikolaus,

Here are some papers from the California waters, but there are more

Saludos

Hi Wolfgang

Another recent paper that you may find useful is:

Malcolm HA, Jordon A, Creese RG and Knott NA (2015)  Size and age are important factors for marine sanctuaries: evidence from a decade of systematic sampling in a subtropical marine park.  Aquatic Conserv. Mar. Freshw. Ecosystems  DOI: 10.1002/acq.s600

While not temperate, the study does provide strong empirical evidence that size and age of 'no-take' areas are important for fish.

Cheers

Jon Day

MPAs are well established in parts of Spain and in the Canaries and while not my area there seems to be at a glance research available in these.  

For example: http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/66/1/64.full 

There are allegedly 78 MPAs that have designated under the European Union's Habitats Directive so there should be plenty of scope for research.

http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/66/1/64.full

Hi Wolfgang,

There are some published papers about a small coastal temperate MPA located in Portugal. Below you can find some examples

Article Early reserve effects linked to small home ranges of a comme...

Article Can small MPAs protect local populations of a coastal flatfi...

Article Small MPAs do not protect cuttlefish ( Sepia officinalis )

Article 'Reserve effect' within a temperate marine protected area in...

Wolfgang,

Check out the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (http://stellwagen.noaa.gov/) off the Massachusetts coast in the U.S., and in particular the report by Cook and Auster on development of alternatives for optimal representation of seafloor habitats (http://stellwagen.noaa.gov/library/pdfs/cook_auster.pdf).  Do a search on the name Stellwagen Bank and you will find a number of additional publications on various topics regarding this MPA.  Hope this is helpful.

Vince

Here you have the links to some papers from the Mediterranean

http://m.imem.ua.es/va/documentos/arxius-imem/articles-investigadors/jose-luis-sanchez-lizaso/goni-et-al-meps-2008-evidence-of-spillover.pdf

http://www.parcmarincotebleue.fr/Page%20a%20telecharger/Effet%20r%E9serve%20p%EAcheries%20Biomex%20Forcada%20et%20al%20%202009%20-MEPS.pdf

http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/67/2/191.full

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jose_Sanchez_Lizaso/publication/237152368_Impact_biologique_et_conomique_de_la_Rserve_marine_de_Tabarca_%28Alicante_Sud-Est_de_lEspagne%29/links/00b7d52342cf6d9d3d000000.pdf

Article Impact biologique et économique de la Réserve marine de Taba...

Hello Mr. (Dr.) Probst,

    The lovely Lough Hyne (or Ine if one prefers) is very small, just a square kilometer or so and at most 50 meters or so deep and it's near the southern tip of Ireland (south of Cork).  The lough is connected to the North Atlantic Ocean by a naturally occurring trench ("The Rapids") that is maybe 50 meters (it's been years)  long and maybe 20-30 meters wide and through which sea water comes and goes with the tidal schedule.  It (Lough Hyne) is rather well studied I think.  I've seem squid and crabs and anemones and sharks and mackerel and sprats and on and on there.  I suggest searching "Lough Hyne" if uou are interested in this precious jewel.  It is, I think, the oldest  marine reserve in Europe.

     Good luck,   Carl Schilt, Bigleaf Science Services, North Bonneville, WA, USA

     [email protected]

Hello Wolfgang...there are 5 marine protected areas off the coast of Oregon, USA, and more off of California. You can do a search for California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, then look for Marine Reserves. The best one off Oregon is called Redfish Rocks. 

Best Regards, Nancy

Hi Nikolaus!

Look this page of NOAA-NMFS, there is a lot information about temperate habitats and the Five Protected Areas in US Pacific Coast. There are Hi and Low Resolution info, I send you the LR

http://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/olohabitat/

Hi Nikolaus,

In the French Mediterranean, there are (at least) two MPA (Port Cros National Park and Scandola in Corsica) that were largely monitored and demonstrated positive effect on the population of emblematic species like Dusky grouper (Epinephelus marginatus) or brown meagre (Sciaena umbra). Below is a reference about meagre, but I think you can find others

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989414000924

Hi Nikolaus

There is well-documented information on the Tsitsikamma and De Hoop MPAs in South Africa. I can put you in touch with Prof Colin Attwood of the University of Cape Town if you are interested.

It is good to see so many documented cases of the effects of MPAs. However, even Wolfgang's clarification of his question ("good studies which clearly show whether there is an effect or not") leaves open an important point: Is the "effect" something that only happens inside the MPA or something broader?

I don't pretend to have read all of the reports offered in postings to this thread but I'll take a guess that most concern the increase in some population inside a protected area. It's good to see such effects documented but they can hardly be a surprise: Fisheries necessarily deplete their resources and excluding fishing from some area should lead to local increases in those exploited species which are semi- (or fully) resident within the MPA. There is no shortage of examples of that effect working as expected.

But can anybody cite evidence of _regional_ increases in abundance or biomass (or any other conservation measure, come to that) resulting from establishment of MPAs? There _should_ be benefits under some circumstances (especially where fishing effort is massively too high) but looking regionally adds extra complications -- including extra complications in documenting effects and ascribing them to MPAs.

Hi everbody,

thank you all very much for the many answers and interesting case studies. What I was looking for was an example in which a MPA increased the local abundance of cod, haddock, whiting, plaice, sole or any other important commercial species. I guess I was looking for evidence (or disapproval) that even fish with a wide activity range can locally benefit from MPAs. Most of the examples in this post are not from boreal but Mediterranean or subtropical waters, in which I presume many fish species live, which are strongly associated with reefs and rocks. Therefore I was wondering, if migrating species such as cod would also show an association to local structures if these proof to be beneficial to them. This question could become interesting with the upcoming increase of artificial structures at the base of offshore-windparks.  

Here you have a review we did some years ago

http://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/36099/1/densodependenciaEC.pdf

Wolfgang,

You seem to have set three different criteria for the cases you are looking for: mobile species (like some principal gadoids and flatfish), important commercial species, and cold-temperate (plus high-latitude?) species. Those are all different: there are plenty of reef-associated species in cold water and plenty of highly-migratory species in the tropics (such as tunas), while the commercially-important, cold-temperate species include various kinds of scallops, which can do very well in protected areas. However, if you are looking for evidence of local benefits of spatial protections for species that are _simultaneously_ mobile, cold-temperate and commercially-important, then you have narrowed the field quite a bit.

One whole class of success stories is the nursery-area closures. There have been some classic failures, when the boundaries were drawn in the wrong place, but there is no shortage of successes -- not only defining success by higher survival within the closure but also in higher catches when the young fish migrate out as they grow. (Though losses to fishermen targeting other species who get shut out of the nursery closure are generally not included in the measure of "success", when they should be.)

If you are only interested in protections applied to individuals of exploitable sizes and ages, the examples get scarcer. I don't think that there is a convenient summary report but the "Haddock Box" on Western Bank (off Nova Scotia) provides an interesting example, for those willing to dig through assessment documents, survey reports and the like. Whatever success that had was lost, however, with the general collapse of the Atlantic Canadian groundfish fisheries in the early 1990s. (Haddock in Canadian waters have, in any case, shown a major range contraction which has yet to be explained -- or even investigated. That complicates evaluation of any one management measure.)

A better-documented example is likely to be the two large closures to groundfish fishing on Georges Bank that were put into place in 1994 (and which closely followed the boundaries of pre-existing seasonal closures designed to protect pre-spawning aggregations of haddock). I dare say some would argue the point but I think that those closures have materially aided the recovery of haddock. You will find plenty of published comments on them, though I cannot immediately cite a good overall summary paper. 

Outside your immediate interest, but a valuable lesson from the closures on Georges nonetheless: Closing selected areas pushed fishing effort to other parts of Georges and the Gulf of Maine. Naturally enough, with primarily-haddock grounds closed, the areas that saw extra fishing tended to be those more favoured by cod. After 20+ years, the haddock are doing well but the cod are severely depressed. No surprise there. Today, the controls needed to limit cod catches severely constrain the ability of the U.S. groundfish fleet to land the haddock (though the Canadian fleet is catching a lot, which then get trucked down to Boston to supply consumer demand there -- a nice benefit to someone). The situation on the U.S. side of the line is worse than it might have been because, for a decade or so, the existence of the closures allowed the management system to ignore the growth in fleet capacity and the consequent high mortality imposed on some local components of the resources, outside the closures (a sort of negative feed-back effect).

The moral I draw is that, while there is a technical interested in whether one or another species benefits from this or that MPA, within the boundaries of the protected area, effective oceans management needs to consider the regional implications of spatial management measures, as they impact on all of the species that we seek to conserve. It needs to consider those implications in light of other management measures (e.g. effective controls on fishing mortality rates outside the MPAs), particularly other spatial controls, and across the various human interests in the ecosystem (including the non-consumptive ones). That is massively complex. We can skip most of it if there are only a few, small MPAs in a region but, if closures are to be big enough to aid conservation of highly-mobile species, the important questions need to be looked at regionally.

Trevor

Here is an interesting paper on how cod around the West Coast of Scotland was not protected by closures during spawning seasons. The authors assume that the measure were too little too late...

Clarke, J., Bailey, D. M., and Wright, P. J. 2015. Evaluating the effectiveness of a seasonal spawning area closure. ICES Journal of Marine Science, 72: 2627-2637.

Here is another example from Canada off the press suggesting benificial impacts of MPAs in temperate waters...

Kincaid, K., and Rose, G. 2017. Effects of closing bottom trawling on fisheries, biodiversity and fishing communities in a boreal marine ecosystem: the Hawke Box off Labrador, Canada. . Canadian Journal of Fisheries & Aquatic Sciences, online early.

Here's something quite recent: Preprint Managing marine protected areas in Europe: moving from 'feat...