Grantee:  Comunidad y Biodiversidad, A.C. (COBI)

Contact:  Dr. Jorge Torre

Project Summary:

Fully-protected marine reserves are the tool with an ecosystem approach to accomplish conservation and sustainable fisheries. Currently, they are widely promoted over the world. The promotion is mainly done by governmental agencies, non-governmental conservation organizations and researchers; not always by the fishing communities. Once the reserves are established, evaluation of their effectiveness is done, in the majority of the cases, by the same groups promoting them. The information collected is often caught in a bottleneck of resource availability and capacity. In the end there is mistrust by the stakeholders of the final results of such analysis, because they only see the final recommendations in “complex” graphs and tables, and do not understand them, nor have they participated in their generation.

The present project has as its goal the development of modules for a larger software package (Delphos) currently developed by Comunidad y Biodiversidad, A.C. (COBI) and Ecotrust.  This module will take stakeholders (fishers, managers, protected areas staff) in a step-by-step process from sub-tidal censuses data collection, through data entry to basic data analysis and simple report creation.  The objective is to encourage stakeholder involvement in the evaluation of the effectiveness of marine reserves and to increase capacity for such monitoring.