Exploring spatial similarity and performance among marine protected area planning scenarios: The case of the Weddell Sea, Antarctica

The world's oceans are exposed to a variety of pressures, such as overfishing and the environmental effects of increasingly dense coastal populations. Policy and science agree that a global network of marine protected areas (MPAs) will mitigate these effects. Conservation planners face the dual challenge of planning MPAs based on complex scientific information and supporting the decision-making process through clear and transparent communication with the involved stakeholders. To this end, visual comparisons of different mapped reserve configurations are a commonly used approach, while analytical approaches that assess the efficiency of different planning scenarios and trade-offs among them are still rarely used in practice. Here, we use uni- and multivariate statistics to compare reserve configurations used in the process of designing a Weddell Sea MPA (WSMPA) in Antarctica. We show that different target level settings (low, medium, mixed) for conservation features affect the configuration of the solutions significantly. The mixed-target scenario was one of the most flexible ones in that it produced the most diverse set of solutions, providing several options for consideration. At the same time, it was also the most well balanced scenario, finding relatively cost-efficient solutions while selecting an intermediate number of planning units that were most spatially clustered. Our study complements the qualitative sensitivity analysis carried out previously (mainly visual, descriptive scenario comparisons) and will hopefully further advance the WSMPA development process under CCAMLR. Furthermore, this paper adds to the growing literature advocating the application of multivariate statistics for further thorough and systematic evaluation procedures in conservation planning.