How important are protected areas? That's what we're gonna talk about on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, because there's been a new study that came out talking about certain protected areas that are better than others, that have unintended positive impacts on a specific area that's protected that is beyond what is protected for. We're gonna talk about all this on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show.
(upbeat music) Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action.
And on today's episode, we're gonna be talking about protected areas, one of my favorite topics, because if you don't know me by now, I have a master's in looking at marine protected areas on the East Coast of Nova Scotia, which is where this study kind of talks about, not necessarily Nova Scotia, but in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in the St. Lawrence area.
We looked at this study called Assessing Indirect Biodiversity Conservation Benefits of Fisheries Closures in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, talks about protected areas and how some protected areas have an alternative benefit to them, even though it wasn't the primary role that they were protected for. We're gonna talk all about protected areas, not to worry, just wanna introduce that.
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And if you want a newsletter with all ocean news, ocean jobs, and the latest podcast out, a video podcast or audio podcast out for you, all you have to do is go to SpeakUpForBlue.com forward slash newsletter to sign up for the newsletter and get it to your inbox Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. Eastern. All right, let's get into the episode. Look, protected areas are important. We know that protected areas protect and keep biodiversity and fisheries intact. That's what it's best for.
And what it is essentially is an area in the ocean that has these sort of translucent imaginary boundaries because there's nothing physical that's stopping people from being there, but it's a designated area that takes away a specific thing. So a specific normally extractive process. So you can't drill oil and gas. You can't use fishery. You can't fish in the area, commercial or recreational. Sometimes people can't go there for recreational purposes.
And there's some that are Marine reserves where you can't do anything at all. Not even scientific research. There are Marine protected areas all over the world. And there are different definitions on specific protected areas. The ones that we're going to be talking about today are called other effective area based conservation measures, also known as OECMs. Look, scientists, we love our acronyms. So this one is OECMs. You're going to notice as an other protected area.
It's an effective area based conservation measure. Okay. But we have also Marine protected areas, MPAs. And the biggest difference between those is OECMs are areas that achieve conservation outcomes as a byproduct of other management objectives. So if the original management objective was fisheries closures, well then biodiversity is protected because of those fisheries closures. And we're going to talk about that on today's episode, because that's the subject really that we're talking about.
MPAs are legally designated to protect Marine biodiversity and ecosystems as a primary goal. So right off the bat, that's what they're doing. Okay. The main purpose of an OECM is not necessarily to establish for conservation, but provide incidental biodiversity protection. So they could be a fisheries closure or it could be an indigenous managed area. Okay. Or it could be something that's culturally significant, like a boat that sank a while ago and is historically important to people.
For MPAs, the main purpose is specifically created to protect marine habitats, species and ecosystems under formal conservation laws. These are MPAs, you cannot go in them like OECMs, other effective area based conservation measures. These are for other purposes, but they have a byproduct impact, which is a great impact. Okay. So let's look at this study. This is a great study is on PLS01, which we love. You can say plus one. I'd say PLS01. This is one of the journals that is open access.
It's available to everybody. And what this article on PLS01 did was how these OECMs contribute to biodiversity conservation beyond their primary objective of protecting target areas. The study focuses 11 OECMs in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, and assesses their indirect benefits to commercial and ecologically important species. So here's some of the key points and findings.
So the background on OECMs and conservation goals is that this is where the OECMs are areas where biodiversity conservation occurs as a byproduct. Right. We talked about this of management activities rather than the primary objective, which is like a marine protected area or things like that. The study examines whether OECMs originally established for fisheries management also provide indirect benefits by protecting critical habitats for other species, therefore maintaining biodiversity.
So the Gulf of St. Lawrence is a highly productive marine ecosystem with important commercial fisheries and making a relevant area for this assessment. So here's what they looked at. They looked at a spatial analysis overlap, right? So they looked at how to evaluate whether these OECMs coincided with important habitats such as spawning or juvenile habitats of Atlantic halibut, Greenland halibut and redfish. Three key fish species that are in these areas.
The study used species distribution models and habitat suitability maps to determine if closures overlapped with essential fish habitat. So this is really important because when you have these fisheries management areas, these are areas that they close down for certain times of the year or all year round, depending on the OECM. And they are there to protect these fish. That's what they're there to do for that fishing purpose.
So it could be for Atlantic halibut, Greenland halibut and redfish or just one of those species or just two of those species. It depends on the area. There's 11 of them. They all have different criteria. Now, if there are special areas for other species beyond the three or even for others, so say that one area is protected for Atlantic halibut, but there are Greenland halibut there in the area that's a spawning area or juvenile habitat that's within those boundaries that will also be protected.
Almost like an umbrella species that we talk about in conservation. So when you have an umbrella species like a whale, you protect that whale and you protect everything that's under that whale, all the habitat that's below that. Well, you're doing the same thing. You have this fisheries management closure in this specific area and everything that's found underneath is a bonus protection, right? So if it's a spawning area, it's bonus.
If it's an overlapping juvenile habitat area, that's bonus too, because you're protecting the other species that are in the area and that's always helpful. So that's what we're talking about here when we talk about what's overlapped with this potential areas, the OECMs. That's a big thing. So the main find is eight out of the 11 OECMs overlapped with potential spawning habitats. How do they know this? I talked about it earlier, habitat suitability map.
So what we're looking at is what is good for like we have all these three species. What do they like? What type of habitats do they like? We kind of have these criteria that we look at. We look at depth. We look at substrate. We look at salinity. We look at temperature. And if those vary within the Gulf of Mexico, which they usually do, then we look at these special areas and what is found there. And we just correlate those together.
And if those species are found there over and over and over again, year after year after year, then we say, Hey, you know what? They may like this area so much that if there's another area around there, that might be another important area. So some of these suitability maps were used to identify specific areas that may be good for another species. And that's how these suitability maps are used.
Okay. So the findings suggest that despite their original purpose, which is protecting certain species like snow crab, so not even Atlantic halibut, Greenland halibut or redfish, the OECMs may have unintended conservation benefits for other marine species. The study highlights the value of integrating fisheries management with conservation objectives, demonstrating that a well-placed fisheries closure can contribute to a broader biodiversity protection.
And the authors recommend considering using indirect conservation benefits when evaluating these effectiveness of the OECM. So this is what happens is we always want marine protected areas because those are legally binding. For Canada, especially when we talk about the Gulf of St. Lawrence, this is a Gulf that is enshrined in Canadian waters. And so we want to make sure that we protect these. So marine protected areas are probably your benefit. But then you have OECMs.
These other protected areas that have unintended impacts, like positive impacts on other species, there may not be completely legally binding, but they're important because if you protect them from fisheries, you're probably protecting whatever habitat that's under there, whether it's a spawning habitat or something else. So having these in your conservation strategy might be best.
You may not be able to get an MPA status, but you could get an OECM status and then protect everything that's underneath that, which may even say, hey, you know what? We should make these OECMs even bigger because we can include more habitats that we didn't know that were there beforehand. So when you go into these OECMs, you're like, this is a fisheries closure. What else can we protect under here? How can we design these boundaries that will actually protect everything?
And when you protect biodiversity, it's really important because biodiversity means stability of the ocean in that particular area. If you don't have high biodiversity, you don't have great stability. And that can change a system that can flip a system into something that's different that can affect fisheries, that can affect tourism, that can affect just the overall health of the ocean and the quality of the ocean.
So for instance, if you think of a coral reef, if you lose a lot of algae eating fish that keep algae off the corals, then you can lose a lot of those corals based on algae growth and increased sunlight, increased sea surface temperature. And then the diversity is going to decrease because there's not going to be a coral reef in that area because the fish just disappear.
The coral reefs can't stop the algae from overgrowing and all the other fish that depend on these corals to live and for hiding spots and everything, they just don't have anything to be there for. So you get eaten or they leave or they die off and nothing these species don't want to be there. So you get this degradation of a habitat. So I'm talking about the health of an actual habitat. So what we wanted to look at is how can we put this into marine conservation and policies?
This study supports the growing recognition that OECMs are an important conservation tool that can complement marine protected areas. They don't always have to be marine protected areas. To get a marine protected area established in Canada or even the world, it is very difficult. It takes a long time. It has to go through a specific process. It could be very, very long before you can get an MPA status. And sometimes you may not be able to get it in time to protect what you're trying to protect.
It also suggests that OECM should be formally recognized in conservation strategies. I think this is something that's not taking as seriously as we hope and as they can contribute to the international biodiversity targets such as a convention of biological diversity's 30 by 30 target. Now, here's where we have to be careful. We want MPAs because MPAs under the definition have no extractive processes in the MPA. OECMs have something different.
They may be closed for fisheries management, but they may be open to oil and gas drilling. We don't know or mining. We have no idea, right? So there can be other things that happen within that area. But an MPA under the definition, IUCN definition is like, don't touch. That's it. We are not touching it at all. Nobody can do anything. Nothing extractive. Don't even go in there.
So we have to be careful when we start proposing that these OECMs be a part of the strategy because this is where we were at before the MPA strategy used to be that you can still drill for oil if they so desired. If the companies that had those leases so desired now that's frowned upon. You don't do that. I don't think you can even do that. When you go to look at OECMs, you can do other extractive processes, which are pretty much not be good for that OECM. So we do have to be careful with that.
But policymakers should adopt a more holistic approach when assessing conservation effectiveness. So not just MPAs, look at OECMs and look at what else they're protecting, considering not only direct protections, but also indirect ecosystem benefits. Essentially, what we're talking about here is that fisheries closures within OECM can have a significant biodiversity benefits beyond their initial goals, reinforcing the needs to integrate OECMs into broader conservation planning.
That's what this study says. I don't completely agree with it, but you can never go wrong with another protected area. It underscores the importance of spatial planning in marine ecosystems. Spatial planning essentially is taking a business plan and putting it into the ocean. It's what we do on land all the time. We have green zones. We have industrial zones. We have residential areas. It's all spatially planned.
We should do that with the ocean with the amount of different users we have oil and gas, recreation, commercial fishing and other commercial like shipping and so forth. So many conflicting uses that we need to plan that all out to make sure that certain areas are designated for certain things. That's what we want to do. But it's basically that kind of plan.
So it underscores the importance of spatial planning and marine ecosystems and the need for adaptive management approaches that can recognize the multiple benefits of area based protections. Adaptive management is the key to figuring out management now and in the future. Adaptive management is essentially what it sounds like. You adapt to what happens in that area.
If something changes or the water quality changes or the sea surface temperature changes or something else happens, then you have to adapt to that and you have to adapt your policies to match what's happening to a future. So you have to effectively manage that area. So that's essentially what it is. It's just every year, every five years you look back and say, what's changed and do we need to change our policies in regards to that? That's essentially the episode. It's a pretty cool study.
I really like what I read on there. I'll put the link in the show notes so you can get access to that. But if you have any questions or comments on this, I would love to hear from you. You can hit me up on Instagram DM me at how to protect the ocean. That's at how to protect the ocean. And don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell if you're watching this on YouTube. And if you're not going over, you could see my pretty little face. I'm just kidding.
But yeah, you can go there on YouTube. You can also see the video on Spotify and listen to the audio on Spotify. And of course, listen to the audio on your favorite podcast app. I want to thank you and don't forget you can go to speak up for blue.com to get access to all of that. The videos, the audio, whatever you need. Go to speak up from blue.com. And I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the how to protect the ocean podcast.
I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the true North strong and free. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.