Marine protected areas as a precautionary approach to management

Various sources of uncertainty have greatly impeded the effectiveness of traditional fisheries management to assure acceptable levels of sustainability of fisheries and species populations. Marine protected areas are receiving increasing consideration and show potential as a means of contributing to the sustainability of populations and guarding against fishery failures. Marine protected areas take advantage of the open population structure that characterizes most exploited benthic marine species by considering the pelagic dispersal of propagules and the patchy distribution of benthic habitat. Because protected areas have only recently been considered for west coast fisheries, because poorly designed reserves may be useless and possibly detrimental, and because optimal design criteria are not yet understood, incorporating the evaluation of empirically derived design criteria into the final implementation of protected area networks (i.e., adaptive management) is the only prudent approach.