Speaker: Will White, Associate Professor, Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station, Oregon State University

Topic: Climate Resilience and the Adaptive Management of Marine Protected Areas

Recent years have seen considerable interest in setting aside regions of the ocean as Marine Protected Areas. This ranges from the international agreement to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030 ("30x30") to legislation just signed in Oregon supporting the state's own marine reserves program. However, it is not always clear what conservation benefits such protections could or will bring – and increasingly there is much hope that they could provide resilience to climate change impacts. Ideally, protected areas would have an adaptive management plan that defines the expected benefits of protection, monitoring after protection, and then evaluations of whether those benefits have been realized. In this talk I share results from spatial models of fished populations that identify how and when protected areas could provide resilience to disturbances (such as marine heatwaves), how best to monitor protected areas to assess resilience, and possible problems that could arise in the way we interpret monitoring data. Overall, the lesson is that we should be careful in setting expectations for the magnitude and timeframe of resilience benefits from reserves, and thoughtful in how we evaluate monitoring data.