International efforts are underway to establish well-connected systems of marine protected areas (MPAs) covering at least 10% of the ocean by 2020. But the nature and dynamics of ocean ecosystem connectivity are poorly understood, with unresolved effects of climate variability. We used 40-year runs of a particle tracking model to examine the sensitivity of an MPA network for habitat-forming col...

Protected areas (PAs) have long been criticized as creations of and for an elite few, where associated costs, but few benefits, are borne by marginalized rural communities. Contrary to predictions of this argument, we found that average human population growth rates on the borders of 306 PAs in 45 countries in Africa and Latin America were nearly double average rural growth, suggesting that PAs...

Coral reefs are severely threatened and a principal strategy for their conservation is marine protected areas (MPAs). However the drivers of MPA performance are complex and there are likely to be trade-offs between different types of performance (e.g. conservation or welfare related outcomes). We compiled a global dataset from expert knowledge for 76 coral reef MPAs in 33 countries and identifi...

This paper outlines an approach to natural resource management that incorporates multiple objectives for protected area management within a decision-making framework. Both regulators and other major stakeholders are directly incorporated into the approach to enhance decision-making processes. We call this approach trade-off analysis. The approach uses a framework based on multi-criteria analysi...

This paper investigates how the introduction of user fees and defensive expenditures changes the complex dynamics of a discrete-time model, which represents the interaction between visitors and environmental quality in an open-access protected-area OAPA . To investigate this issue more deeply, we begin by studying in great detail the OAPA model, and then we introduce the user fee β and the defe...

In 1872, United States President Ulysses Grant set aside 2.2 million acres of wilderness, primarily for recreational purposes, as the first formally recognized protected area (PA)—Yellowstone National Park. The concept took hold slowly over the next hundred years, and PAs are now recognized as essential to biodiversity conservation [1] and as irreplaceable tools for species and habitat manageme...

Human land uses surrounding protected areas provide propagules for colonization of these areas by non-native species, and corridors between protected-area networks and drainage systems of rivers provide pathways for long-distance dispersal of non-native species. Nevertheless, the influence of protected-area boundaries on colonization of protected areas by invasive non-native species is unknown....

Protected areas worldwide are facing increasing pressures to co-manage human development and biodiversity conservation. One strategy for managing multiple uses within and around protected areas is zoning, an approach in which spatial boundaries are drawn to distinguish areas with varying degrees of allowable human impacts. However, zoning designations are rarely evaluated for their efficacy usi...

The advent of location-based technologies deployed in protected areas provides both visitors and managers of such areas with new opportunities. In this paper we investigate the potential for mining individual tracks of visitors’ geospatial lifelines to both extract information describing aggregated patterns of group behaviour and characterise individual actions. Methods to spatio-temporally clu...

Conservationists recognize that many protected areas have limited future prospects without the cooperation and support of local people, especially in developing countries. Since the 1980s Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) have attempted to reconcile park management with local needs and aspirations, usually with disappointing results. Achieving local cooperation and suppor...