Studies conducted in California and other locations support the use of marine reserves as a tool for managing fisheries and protecting marine habitats. Several biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) are involved in a collaborative project known as PANGAS, in which researchers work with Mexican fishing communities to study and manage fisheries in the northern Gulf of California. Local fishermen in the area of Puerto Peñasco set up a network of marine reserves to manage their resources and track results. For species that tend to stay put, unlike tuna and squid, marine protected areas can range from no-take reserves to various levels of limited harvesting. Since the establishment of the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), a network of protected areas was established on the Central and North Coasts. Professors of ecology and evolutionary biologists at UCSC Peter Raimondi and Mark Carr are involved in an intensive monitoring program to track the effects of the reserves that have already been established although according to Carr it will take a few more years of monitoring for effects to become visible.
Richard Cudney-Bueno, research associate at UCSC’s Institute of Marine Sciences and cofounder of the PANGAS project has been working with Mexican fishing communities and conducting ecological and social research in the Gulf of California as well. The first reserve in the Puerto Peñasco area was established in 2001 around an island where Cudney-Bueno and other researchers, worked with a Mexican nonprofit organization (Centro Intercultural de Estudios de Desiertos y Océanos), to train the fishermen to monitor shellfish populations in and around the reserve. The Mexican government has created one of a handful of exclusive fishing zones in the Gulf of California, giving the local cooperative the exclusive legal right to harvest shellfish in the Puerto Peñasco area. The PANGAS project, which draws experts from UCSC, the University of Arizona, and several collaborating academic institutions and nonprofit organizations in Mexico, is working with other fishing communities in the Gulf of California to develop future management plans for the region’s marine resources. According to Carr, the California MLPA process is currently being used across the globe, especially in the United Kingdom.
