Isechal, A. L., Koshiba, S., Rehm, L., Victor, S.

Assessing the management effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas in Micronesia

2014

The Nature Conservancy

PICRC Technical Report 14-04

37

"The development of modern conservation in Micronesia has incorporated many elements of traditional management and has resulted in a variety of innovative co-management schemes, governance structures and strategies unique to Micronesia and even to each of the island jurisdictions. The bulk of conservation efforts have been focused on establishing MPAs through community engagement, mitigating immediate threats, and building networks and creating opportunities to increase capacity for various aspects of MPA management. More recently the direction has somewhat shifted to effective planning for these MPAs. This shift to conservation planning has been driven by such tools as PIMPACs Guide to Management Planning and TNCs Conservation Action Planning and has cast all these past and perhaps fragmented efforts into a more unified model of adaptive management. And as MPA management plans and other action plans are being implemented, site managers will need to improve their ability to capture the experiences and results of current management actions and then using that to adapt, by refining existing strategies or developing new ones. This need to capture results has been made evident by current regional efforts to standardize the collection of monitoring data and how that data is managed and interpreted to inform management actions. Marine protected area management effectiveness assessments were conducted in 7 Micronesia Challenge jurisdictions: Guam, RMI, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Kosrae, Yap and Palau. While the results of such assessments will be most useful for adaptive management at the site-level, there is potential usefulness at the network level. Such local and regional initiatives as the Protected Areas Network in Palau and the Micronesia Challenge could potentially use the results of these effectiveness assessments to track network or regional progress and trends."

FY2009 CRCP Project 20411; Project Title: Partnership Agreement with The Nature Conservancy; Principal Investigator: Jenny Waddell ~ FY09 CRCP grant NA09NOS4190173

NOS/Office for Coastal Management (OCM)

NA09NOS4190173