Abstract
Although Brazil has one of the world’s largest systems of protected areas, we do not know to what extent its marine protected areas (MPAs) are functioning as repositories of threatened species. Here we synthesized governmental and scientific information on the country's 75 federal MPAs to assess whether their size, age, protection group, visitation and management effectiveness affect the number of threatened animal species present within their boundaries. The MPAs harbored 133 threatened species, which corresponds to 78.2% of the 170 threatened marine animal species listed for the country. On average, there were 10.1 threatened species per MPA (varying from 1 to 48), but 13 MPAs did not report any. As expected, the number of threatened species was greater in no-take, larger, and older MPAs with management plan. The MPA effectiveness index averaged 0.55 (0.43–0.74), indicating moderate effectiveness for the entire federal system. The level of management effectiveness in 2022 and the visitation accumulated between 2012 and 2021 did not significantly affect the number of threatened species. Our results demonstrate that Brazilian MPAs do serve as repositories for threatened animal species, but reveal serious bottlenecks in the management of official databases, dissemination of information to society, and biodiversity inventory and monitoring. We recommend (i) improvements in working conditions for MPA officials; (ii) advances in data management and publicization; (iii) partnerships of MPA managers with universities, research institutions, and non-governmental organizations; and (iv) the development of a broad, long-term biodiversity monitoring program.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq Grant Number 312178/2019-0 and 307260/2022-4 to BAS), and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brazil (CAPES, graduate scholarship to LCCS). BAS is also grateful to Universidade Federal da Paraíba (Grant Number PVA-13357-2020). We are grateful to Allan Yu for help with map production and three reviewers for critical comments on previous versions of this manuscript.
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Both authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection were performed by LCCS. Both authors analyzed the data. The first draft of the manuscript was written by LCCS and BAS commented on previous versions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Silva, L.C.C., Santos, B.A. Are Brazilian marine protected areas repositories of threatened species?. Biodivers Conserv 33, 793–805 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-024-02780-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-024-02780-6