Dispersion and connectivity modelling#
Q 7 - How to protect deep Vulnerable marine Ecosystems (VMEs) (strategies, measures, etc.)?
Q 17 - How to identify priority areas for conservation of pelagic biodiversity?
Q 34 - How to achieve the strict protection area target of 10% by 2030 in marine areas?
Q 37 - How to maintain local retention / population persistence within the MPA?
Q 41 - What are the main objectives and elements of monitoring programs for MPAs?
Q 55 - How to anticipate and address climate change within a MPA network?
Q 17 - How to identify priority areas for conservation of pelagic biodiversity?
Description#
Tools incorporating connectivity through the explicit consideration of dispersion (active and passive) and migration processes (functional connectivity) and seascape features that facilitate or prevent the movement of organisms (structural connectivity) are still rare.
Currently, Zonation 5 and PlanWise4Blue are able to consider connectivity in their prioritization algorithms. This is mainly done through the consideration of structural aspects of habitats that facilitate the movement of species (habitat cohesion and integrity, corridors) when prioritizing different conservation strategies.
Functional connectivity, i.e., the actual movement of organisms, has not been explicitly and effectively incorporated in the assessed tools. The difficulties to generate reliable data (thing that has been changing in the last decade with the improvement of tracking technologies and methods for the analysis of genetic and chemical markers) and the computational demands of algorithms used to model different connectivity processes have prevented the effective consideration of functional connectivity in decision-making processes. However, a recent academic exercise using Symphony has shown how to incorporate information on larval dispersion derived from a Lagrangian particle-tracking model in a CEA (Jonsson et al., 2021).
Source: Kotta et al. (2024) Ecological toolkit (ESE1) for MPAs prioritization and networking. Deliverable – D3.4., under the WP3 of MSP4BIO project (GA n° 101060707)