Following his sabbatical year in our research group, Rodolphe Devillers (Canada) worked with us on a study of the distribution of marine protected areas in relation to fishing and oil and gas activities. This work, published in 2015, confirmed a tendency of MPAs to be ‘residual’, or created in places of low economic interest, often irrespective of their value for conservation. This study received some attention in the scientific community and the paper remains one of the most cited paper in the journal Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems.
Five years later, we decided to revisit the topic in the context of a special issue of the journal, looking at the impacts research papers had on science and management. We published our retrospective late last year. We reviewed papers citing our 2015 study and asked marine conservation experts about their reactions, trying to better understand the impacts our study had. Results confirmed a strong general uptake in the scientific community but more uneven impacts on policy and management, with a likely smaller impact on conservation practice. Reflecting on the impact of academic studies is important to ensure that key findings lead to actual changes. While research impacts on conservation practice do not happen overnight, we believe our study brought the issue of residual MPAs to light and helped to show that focusing too much on increasing MPA coverage, regardless of threats to marine biodiversity, can lead to counterproductive biases in MPA distributions.
Figure 7 from the 2015 paper, showing no overlap of restrictive MPAs with oil and gas extraction and exploration in north-western Australia.
