A Marine Protected Area Network is a network of Marine Protected Areas or Marine Reserves.
A Marine Protected Area Network can be deļ¬ned as "a collection of individual MPAs or reserves operating cooperatively and synergistically, at various spatial scales, and with a range of protection levels that are designed to meet objectives that a single reserve cannot achieve". Such a network can include several MPAs of different sizes, located in critical habitats, containing components of a particular habitat type or portions of different kinds of important habitats, and interconnected by the movement of animals and plant propagules.
A Marine Protected Area Network is usually established to improve fish catch, to conserve biodiversity, or for a combination of these two reasons. They are usually placed so that larvae can migrate from MPAs to other, more impacted areas. It provides a framework that unifies the central aims of conservation and fishery management, while also meeting other human needs such as maintenance of coastal water quality, shoreline protection, education, research and recreational opportunities.
Famous quotes containing the words marine, protected, area and/or network:
“God has a hard-on for a Marine because we kill everything we see. He plays His game, we play ours.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“Wasn’t marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn’t it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?”
—Edna Ferber (1887–1968)
“I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)