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Striking a Balance between Biodiversity Conservation and Socioeconomic Viability in the Design of Marine Protected Areas

This article offers a case study in how to incorporate consumptive and non-consumptive interests of multiple stakeholders into a systematic design of a marine protected area in order to find a balance between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic viability in protected area. It illustrates detailed and technical methodology of the process with the help of the Marxan program. In addition to using biophysical data to achieve conservation objectives, the authors incorporated consumptive user interests by including fishing data from the recreational and commercial fishing sectors across 24 fisheries and established siting criteria that ensured non-consumptive user objectives were met. The article demonstrates that it is both possible and desirable to merge the interests of multiple stakeholders as marine protected areas that incorporate multiple stakeholder interests without compromising biodiversity conservation goals are more likely to successfully protect marine ecosystems.

This article is available to members of ConserveOnline at the URL above.

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