Who:

Where:

When:

Abstract:

Regional systematic conservation planning is an effective approach to marine protected area (MPA) network design by ensuring complementarity and functional connectivity of areas. However, regional planning and local conservation actions do not properly inform one another. One outcome is the failure of regional designs to guide conservation actions. Another is that site-based MPAs constitute collections rather than functional systems for marine conservation. My thesis addresses two questions: (1) How can conservation planners adapt regional plans to incorporate local objectives, costs and values and unforeseen constraints to the application of actions?; and, (2) how can planners coordinate and integrate local conservation actions with a regional perspective, encouraging complementary management?  To answer these questions, I investigated drivers of the mismatch of scale between planning and implementation, undertake comprehensive social assessments to inform opportunities of implementing conservation, and propose a framework to work with locally relevant conservation actions to achieve regional-scale goals.