No-take marine reserves show great promise as conservation tools, yet the integration of reserves into assessment models for data-limited fisheries management is just emerging. We develop a framework for integrating marine reserves into two data-limited assessment models: spawning potential ratio (SPR) and yield per recruit (YPR). We use Monte Carlo simulation to test the applicability of the f...

Marine reserves are widely used throughout the world to prevent overfishing and conserve biodiversity, but uncertainties remain about their optimal design. The effects of marine reserves are heterogeneous. Despite theoretical findings, empirical studies have previously found no effect of size on the effectiveness of marine reserves in protecting commercial fish stocks. Using 58 datasets from 19...

We have used an end-to-end ecosystem model to explore responses over 30 years to coastal no-take reserves covering up to 6% of the fifty thousand square kilometres of continental shelf and slope off the coast of New South Wales (Australia). The model is based on the Atlantis framework, which includes a deterministic, spatially resolved three-dimensional biophysical model that tracks nutrient fl...

Models for marine reserve design have been developed primarily with 'reef fish' life histories in mind: sedentary adults in patches connected by larval dispersal. However, many fished species undertake ontogenetic migrations, such as from nursery grounds to adult spawning habitats, and current theory does not fully address the range of reserve options posed by that situation. I modelled a gener...

China ranks first among Northern hemisphere countries for species richness, but approximately 43% of its species are threatened [1], with harvesting being the major threat to vertebrates [2]. To protect its biodiversity, China has established about 2,700 nature reserves covering 1.46 million km2 ( about 15% of China's territory, a percentage higher than the world average [3]). With increasing h...

Carotenoid reserves in copepods seem costly in terms of predation risk because they make individuals conspicuous. However, carotenoids also seem to play an important role in immune defence as free radical scavengers. To test whether predation risk influences carotenoid levels and whether changes in carotenoid levels are related to changes in immune defence, I examined individual changes in larg...

Climate change has the potential to alter the distributions of threatened plant species, and may therefore diminish the capacity of nature reserves to protect threatened plant species. Chinese nature reserves contain a rich diversity of plant species that are at risk of becoming more threatened by climate change. Hence, it is urgent to identify the extent to which future climate change may comp...

Marine reserves are viewed as flagship tools to protect exploited species and to contribute to the effective management of coastal fisheries. Yet, the extent to which marine reserves are globally interconnected and able to effectively seed areas, where fisheries are most critical for food and livelihood security is largely unknown. Using a hydrodynamic model of larval dispersal, we predict that...

Countries have accumulated massive foreign reserve portfolios, but the reasons for doing so remain debated. I document a new empirical fact on the compositions of foreign reserve portfolios, and argue that the prevalence of the dollar supports an explanation in which foreign reserves hedge liquidity shocks to dollarized financial systems. First, I fit a Bayesian dynamic linear model to extract ...

Reserves (areas closed to extraction) are increasingly being adopted as a management tool. Two primary arguments are used for their implementation. The first is a biological argument that biodiversity can prosper inside the reserve. The second is that by ceasing harvest inside a reserve we may generate such a large production of individuals, that “spillover” into the harvested region will actua...