1. The global extent of marine protected areas (MPAs) has increased rapidly in the last decade, and monitoring and evaluation are now required for effective and adaptive management of these areas.
2. We classify monitoring in MPAs into four categories and identify a critically important, but undervalued category: human pressure monitoring that targets human activities and their impacts.
3. Human pressure monitoring is fundamental for interpreting the results of ecological performance monitoring and for evaluating MPA management effectiveness. The consequences of ecological performance monitoring that show unsuccessful MPA performance while falsely assuming successful mitigation of human pressures could jeopardize MPA performance analysis and adaptive management, and thus be worse than not monitoring at all.
4. Human pressure monitoring enables using MPAs as reference areas where the effects of global or regional pressures (e.g. climate change) can be disentangled from the effects of local human activities, as well as to minimize the shifting baseline phenomenon in defining healthy stocks. These benefits cannot be realized without active human pressure monitoring integrated into an adaptive management cycle that ensures effective MPA protection.
5. In the absence of human pressure monitoring, all ecological monitoring within MPAs falls in the ambient monitoring category: monitoring that is not intended to measure conservation outcomes.
6. We discuss the implications for monitoring programme design and provide a structure for decision‐makers on how to prioritize monitoring activities within MPAs that place greater emphasis on improving MPAs as biodiversity conservation tools over proving MPA performance.

中文翻译：

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使生态绩效与环境相关：重新思考海洋保护区的监测

1. 在过去十年中，全球海洋保护区（MPA）的规模迅速增加，现在需要对这些区域进行有效和适应性管理的监测和评估。
2. 我们将MPA中的监视分为四个类别，并确定一个至关重要但被低估的类别：针对人类活动及其影响的人类压力监视。
3. 人工压力监测对于解释生态绩效监测结果和评估MPA管理有效性至关重要。生态绩效监测的结果表明MPA绩效不佳，同时错误地假设成功减轻了人类的压力，可能会危害MPA绩效分析和适应性管理，因此比根本不监测更糟。
4. 人工压力监测可以将MPA用作参考区域，在该区域中，可以将全球或区域压力（例如气候变化）的影响与当地人类活动的影响区分开，并最大程度地减少定义健康种群时基线变化的现象。如果没有将主动的人工压力监控集成到确保有效的MPA保护的自适应管理周期中，就无法实现这些优势。
5. 在没有人为压力监测的情况下，海洋保护区内的所有生态监测都属于环境监测类别：不是旨在衡量保护结果的监测。
6. 我们讨论了监视计划设计的含义，并为决策者提供了一个结构，以决定如何在MPA中优先安排监视活动，该活动更加强调改进MPA作为生物多样性保护工具，而不是证明MPA的性能。