Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Mediterranean Marine Protected Areas Have Higher Biodiversity Via Increased Evenness, Not Abundance, Shane A. Blowes, Jonathan M. Chase, Antonio Di Franco, Ori Frid, Nicholas J. Gotelli, Paolo Guidetti, Tiffany M. Knight, Felix May, Daniel J. Mcglinn, Fiorenza Micheli, Enric Sala, Jonathan Belmaker

College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Publications

Journal of Applied Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. Protected areas are central to biodiversity conservation. For marine fish, marine protected areas (MPAs) often harbour more individuals, especially of species targeted by fisheries. But precise pathways of biodiversity change remain unclear. For example, how local-scale responses combine to affect regional biodiversity, important for managing spatial networks of MPAs, is not well known. Protection potentially influences three components of fish assemblages that determine how species accumulate with sampling effort and spatial scale: the total number of individuals, the relative abundance of species and …