Marine Fish Conservation: Global Evidence for the Effects of Selected Interventions (original) (raw)

Bring together scientific evidence captured by the Conservation Evidence project (over 6,616 studies so far) on the effects of interventions to conserve and restore biodiversity Include evidence on the basic ecology of species or habitats, or threats to them List all realistic interventions for the species group or habitat in question, regardless of how much evidence for their effects is available Make any attempt to weight or prioritize interventions according to their importance or the size of their effects Describe each piece of evidence, including methods, as clearly as possible, allowing readers to assess the quality of evidence Weight or numerically evaluate the evidence according to its quality Work in partnership with conservation practitioners, policymakers, and scientists to develop the list of interventions and ensure we have covered the most important literature Provide recommendations for conservation problems, but instead provide scientific information to help with decision-making 1.3 Who is this synopsis for? If you are reading this, we hope you are someone who does, or wants to, make decisions about how best to support, manage, and conserve the marine environment and its biodiversity. You might be a marine conservationist in the public or private sector, a campaigner, a marine advisor or consultant, a policymaker, a researcher, someone taking action to protect the marine environment, or a concerned citizen. This synopsis summarizes scientific evidence relevant to your conservation objectives and the actions you could take to achieve them. We do not aim to make your decisions for you, but to support your decision-making by telling you what evidence there is (or isn't) about the effects that your or others' planned actions could have. Here, by "evidence", we mean any scientific studies found during our systematic searches (see below section 1.6) that quantitatively report the effects of conservation actions (interventions). When decisions have to be made with particularly important or irreversible consequences, we recommend carrying out a systematic review, as the latter is likely to be more comprehensive than the summary of evidence presented here. Guidance on how to carry out systematic reviews can be found from the Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation at the Bangor University (www.cebc.bangor.ac.uk). 1.5 Scope of the review 1.5.1 Review subject This synopsis covered published evidence for the effectiveness of global conservation interventions, and management interventions, aimed at conserving, but also restoring and promoting, marine fish species and communities. This subject has not yet been covered using subject-wide evidence synthesis. This is defined as a systematic method of evidence synthesis that covers entire subjects at once, including all closed review topics within that subject at a fine scale and analysing results through study summary and expert assessment, or through meta-analysis; the term can also refer to any product arising from this process (Sutherland et al. 2019). The topic was therefore a priority for the disciplinewide Conservation Evidence database. 29 1.7 How you can help to change conservation practice If you know of evidence relating to the conservation of marine fish communities that is not included in this synopsis, we invite you to contact us, via our website www.conservationevidence.com. If you have new, unpublished evidence, you can submit a paper to the Conservation Evidence journal. We particularly welcome papers submitted by conservation practitioners. 2. Threat: Biological resource use Biological resource use can have significant impacts on marine fish: directly through species extraction by harvesting (reduced population of commercially targeted as well and non-targeted species-often referred to as "bycatch") and indirectly through impacts on the food chain (removal of predator and prey species and species that provide important functions within the habitat) and on the seabed from fishing gear (modification and destruction of seabed habitats)(