During the planning phase the efficacy of different strategies to manage marine resources should ultimately be assessed by their potential impact, or ability to make a difference to ecological and social outcomes. While community‐based and systematic approaches to establishing marine protected areas have their strengths and weaknesses, comparisons of their effectiveness often fail to explicitly address potential impact. Here, we predict conservation impact to compare recently implemented community‐based marine reserves in Tonga to a systematic configuration specifically aimed at maximizing impact. Boosted regression tree outputs indicated that fishing pressure accounted for ∼24% of variation in target species biomass. We estimate that the community‐based approach provides 84% of the recovery potential of the configuration with the greatest potential impact. This high potential impact results from community‐based reserves being located close to villages, where fishing pressure is greatest. These results provide strong support for community‐based marine management, with short‐term benefits likely to accrue even where there is little scope for systematic reserve design.

中文翻译：

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预测影响以评估基于社区的海洋保护区设计的有效性

在规划阶段，应最终根据各种战略的潜在影响或对生态和社会成果产生影响的能力来评估不同战略对海洋资源进行管理的有效性。尽管基于社区的系统化方法来建立海洋保护区具有优势和劣势，但对其有效性进行比较常常不能明确地解决潜在的影响。在这里，我们预测保护的影响，以便将汤加最近实施的以社区为基础的海洋保护区与专门旨在最大化影响的系统配置进行比较。回归树的增强输出表明，捕捞压力占目标物种生物量变化的〜24％。我们估计，基于社区的方法可为配置提供84％的恢复潜力，并具有最大的潜在影响。如此高的潜在影响是由于社区保护区位于捕鱼压力最大的村庄附近。这些结果为基于社区的海洋管理提供了有力的支持，即使没有系统的保护区设计空间，也可能会产生短期收益。