The largest Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), which restrict fishing for conservation or fisheries benefits, span up to 370km from the shore. Some are larger than France. As you might imagine, protecting such vast expanses of the ocean can bring huge benefits to marine ecosystems. But the creation of large MPAs is a recent phenomenon that has only started to gain momentum during the past decade. Since most large MPAs are so new, there is an ongoing debate over what specific benefits we can expect from them and how they might affect fisheries.

My family is full of generations of New York lifeguards, surfers, and fishing fanatics. Some of my earliest memories are at the beach, playing in the ocean or catching fish with my family. Eventually, all that time spent fishing made me want to focus my career on supporting sustainable fisheries, so I pursued a PhD on tracking fish and fishing vessels to help improve fisheries management.

To better understand how MPAs may influence our ocean, I worked with a team of scientists from Stanford University, the University of California Santa Barbara, and Virginia Tech to examine how industrial fleets respond to the creation of new MPAs. Our study, “Tracking the response of industrial fishing fleets to large Marine Protected Areas in the Pacific Ocean,” points to important considerations for managers of large MPAs when it comes to what we should or should not expect MPAs to achieve.