Author: Patrick Smallhorn-West

Tonga’s coral reefs are increasingly threatened by both local (e.g. overfishing and pollution), and global (e.g. climate change) impacts. However, there is very little information on the current status of their coral reefs, or what the main threats are, and it is very difficult to manage and conserve an ecosystem for which there is little … Continue reading New paper: Biophysical and anthropogenic influences on the status of Tonga’s coral reefs and reef fish fishery

Implementing no-take reserves may benefit marine ecosystems, but at the potential cost of the fishers they displace. Combining no-take areas with areas of exclusive fishing access could provide the required incentives for community management to achieve positive impacts. However, not many protected areas have been assessed for their impact, which involves applying counterfactual thinking to … Continue reading New paper: Community management yields positive impacts for coastal fisheries resources and biodiversity conservation

Environmental conditions and human impacts are key driver of ecological processes and the services they provide. Effective management of marine ecosystems therefore requires up to date information on both environmental and anthropogenic variables. In the Kingdom of Tonga, where the near-shore marine ecosystem is extensive, there are few resources available for it's management and little … Continue reading New spatial data set for marine ecosystem management in the Kingdom of Tonga

Marine protected areas (MPAs) in the South Pacific have a long history. In a recent article led by Patrick Smallhorn-West and published in Biodiversity and Conservation, we reviewed what is currently known about the impacts of MPAs in this region. Impact evaluation involves quantifying the effects of an intervention over and above the counterfactual of no … Continue reading New paper: How much do we know about the conservation impacts of marine protected areas in the South Pacific?

The expansion of coastal marine protected areas can suffer from two key drawbacks: (a) the difficulty of incentivizing local communities to manage areas for conservation when their livelihoods also depend on resource use; and (b) the frequent placement of protected areas where extractive uses pose little threat or in locations with limited value for either … Continue reading New paper: Incentivizing co-management for conservation impact

      When planning a marine reserve, the efficacy of different approaches should be assessed by their potential impact. This research (Smallhorn-West et al. 2018) predicted the impact, or recovery of target species biomass, for different marine reserve configurations in the Vava'u island group in the Kingdom of Tonga. Specifically, we asked whether the … Continue reading New paper: Predicted impact of community-based marine reserve design is comparable to a systematic approach