Catastrophic events, like oil spills and hurricanes, occur in many marine systems. One potential role of marine reserves is buffering populations against disturbances, including the potential for disturbance‐driven population collapses under Allee effects. This buffering capacity depends on reserves in a network providing rescue effects, setting up a tradeoff where reserves need to be connected to facilitate rescue, but also distributed in space to prevent simultaneous extinction. We use a set of population models to examine how dispersal ability and the disturbance regime interact to determine the optimal reserve spacing. We incorporate fishing in a spatially‐explicit model to understand the effect of objective choice (e.g. conservation versus fisheries yield) on the optimal reserve spacing. We show that the optimal spacing between reserves increases when accounting for catastrophes with larger spacing needed when Allee effects interact with catastrophes to increase the probability of extinction. We also show that classic tradeoffs between conservation and fishing objectives disappear in the presence of catastrophes. Specifically, we found that at intermediate levels of disturbance, it is optimal to spread out reserves in order to increase both population persistence and to maximize spillover into non‐reserve areas.

中文翻译：

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海洋保护区网络设计中的灾难性，连通性和Allee效应

诸如溢油和飓风之类的灾难性事件发生在许多海洋系统中。海洋保护区的潜在作用之一是缓冲种群免受干扰，包括在阿利效应下由干扰驱动的种群崩溃的可能性。这种缓冲能力取决于提供救援效果的网络中的储备，在需要连接储备以促进救援的地方进行权衡，但也要分散在空间中以防止同时灭绝。我们使用一组人口模型来检查分散能力和干扰机制如何相互作用，以确定最佳的储备间隔。我们将捕捞纳入空间明确的模型中，以了解客观选择（例如保护与渔业产量）对最佳保护区间隔的影响。我们显示出，当考虑到巨灾时储备之间的最佳间隔会增加，而当Allee效应与巨灾相互作用以增加灭绝的可能性时，则需要更大的间隔。我们还表明，在灾难面前，保护目标和捕捞目标之间的经典权衡消失了。具体而言，我们发现，在干扰的中间水平上，最好分散保护区，以增加人口的持久性并最大程度地向非保护区扩散。