Abstract
Establishing protected areas is one of the most important and recognized strategies for biodiversity conservation. Most of the existing protected areas include terrestrial environments. Only 0.5% of oceans are currently protected by this strategy. Marine reserves are defined as areas of the ocean completely protected from all extractive or destructive activities. Adequately managed marine reserves offer protection of habitats, conservation of biodiversity, protection or enhancement of ecosystem services, export of individuals to fishing grounds, recovery of depleted stocks of exploited species and increase in species richness and abundance. The State of Oregon is implementing a Coastal Marine Reserve Network Plan to complement the current reserves, in an area of 1000 square miles, corresponding to the territorial waters. The principal objective of this Plan is to create a Reserve Network to protect and/or restore the habitats and species of the near shore marine ecosystem. The aim of this study was to contribute to the design of the Reserve Network by applying a systematic site selection process, with the support of Ecotrust, a non-governmental organization based on Oregon, who is participating in the nomination of areas to be included in the marine Reserve Network. The methodology of systematic site selection consists of selecting a specific area that will represent all the biological features of a region. Site selection algorithms such as MARXAN, developed by scientists in the University of Queensland, Australia, are used in this process. The purpose of this study was to apply a systematic site selection process to the design of a Reserve Network on Oregon’s coast that would be representative of the biological diversity of the region. The specific objectives were: 1) To obtain and process spatial information on the study area to be use in the analysis. 2) To use MARXAN software to select sites for potential reserve networks using different surrogates, goals and degrees of compactness. 3) To compare the performance of the resultant reserve networks in maximizing the inclusion of biological diversity. Two hypotheses were tested: the first was that reserve networks selected using increasing percentages (10%, 30%, 50%) of the area of marine habitat as goals, will include increasing levels of regional biodiversity; and the second was that reserve networks selected using range-restricted species as surrogates, will maximize diversity inclusion compared to areas selected using widespread species. Eleven habitat types were identified and used in the analysis. Three spatial configurations of each scenario (10%, 30%, 50% of habitat area) were selected in order to analyze the effects of area and perimeter on specie richness included in each possible network. To test the first hypothesis, a multiple regression was done. To test the second hypothesis, the results were analyzed using a T test to establish whether the diversity of species included in the reserve network selected using widespread species, was significantly different to the diversity included in scenarios selected using restricted range species as surrogates. The results show a significant effect of area on species richness, but no effect of perimeter. The results of this study indicated the sufficient area for a Reserve Network in Oregon Coast in order to include a representative sample of the biological diversity of the region and provide the performance of different biodiversity surrogates.