Fisheries–Marine Protected Area–Tourism Interactions in Moalboal,Cebu, Philippines

The development of Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) in the Philippines has been underway for more than 30 years. As coastal communities continue to face dwindling resources from both the land and sea, marine protected areas (MPAs) have been regularly utilized as a community-based marine conservation tool. Recently, marine tourism has begun to exert influence as a driver utilized by local communities to promote the establishment of MPAs. Revenue generated through user-fee systems has begun to influence and shape broker–local–tourist (BLT) interactions in Moalboal, Cebu, Philippines. In this article, an account of the social dynamics surrounding MPAs is presented, sources of tension are identified, and recommendations proposed.     

How Are Our MPAs Doing? Challenges in Assessing Global Patterns in Marine Protected Area Performance

Without effective management, protected areas are unlikely to achieve the high expectations the conservation and development sectors have for them: conserving biodiversity and alleviating poverty. Numerous marine protected area (MPA) assessment initiatives have been developed at various spatial and temporal scales, including the guidebook How is your MPA doing? These management assessments have been useful to sites to clarify and evaluate their objectives, yet efforts to examine broader regional or global patterns in MPA performance are only beginning. The authors conducted exploratory trend analyses on How is your MPA doing? indicator data collected by 24 MPAs worldwide to identify challenges and areas for future work. Wide variability across sites with regard to the indicators examined and the constructs used to measure them prevented a true meta-analysis. Managers assessed biophysical indicators more often than socioeconomic and governance constructs. Investment by the conservation community to support collecting and reporting high-quality data at the site level would enable a better understanding of the variation in MPA performance, clarify the contribution of MPAs to both biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation, and help drive better MPA performance. The absence of rigorous and consistent monitoring protocols and instruments and a platform to turn raw MPA monitoring data into actionable information is a critical but under-recognized obstacle to cross-project learning, comparative analyses, and adaptive resource management.     

Analysis of Coastal Wetland Changes Using the “DPSIR” Model: A Case Study in Xiamen,China

Over the past several decades, human activities have had significant impacts on coastal wetlands worldwide. Here, using a model of “Drivers-Pressures-State-Impacts-Responses (DPSIR)” and data collected from coastal wetlands in Xiamen, China, we have analyzed temporal changes in regional coastal wetland ecosystem structure and function from 1950 through 2005. The study period was divided into four parts for comparative analysis: pre-1980s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000 to present. Our results show that anthropogenic drivers of coastal wetland degradation in this region have increased substantially since 1950, and that this is correlated with a decline in coastal wetland function over the same period.     

Field data observations for monitoring the impact of typhoon “In-fa” on dynamic performances of mono-pile offshore wind turbines: A novel systematic study

For offshore structures such as offshore wind turbines (OWT), typhoon is usually considered one of the most critical threats to structural safety performances and service life due to its heavy wind, wave, and even coexisted storm surge. Meanwhile, it is challenging to obtain the systematic data from the environmental conditions, structural dynamic vibrations and the SCADA record, when typhoon passes by the offshore wind farm. Taking into account these situations, a real-time multi-source monitoring system enabling the investigation of the typhoon impact on the performances of OWT, has been firstly established and implemented to a 4.0 MW mono-pile OWT in Rudong, Jiangsu, China. One of the major contributions in this work is to develop the monitoring system using a unique environment of real-world data that has been synchronously obtained from waves, winds, vibrational accelerations, inclinations of towers and SCADA data during the typhoon “In-fa” passing by the wind farm, and provide the scientific community with the underlying standards and technical recommendations. To investigate the influence caused by “In-fa”, comparison results of the measured data in the range of June to August have been analysed. It is worth noting that two conclusions have been obtained: (1) the region near the nacelle is not always the most critical vibrational area. Actually, the change of the maximum structural response in the position under different external loads should be applied to effectively evaluate the structural safety; (2) the measured accelerations exhibit an obvious decay process in the presence of the turbine rotor-stop, but not the yaw rigid-body motion. This observation promotes the accurate identification of modal parameters for the long-term monitoring. Consequently, these valuable findings to facilitate the assessment of structural operational conditions have been developed into two guide-lines. All the data and analyses presented in this paper provide a valuable insight into the design, energy efficiency, safety monitoring and damage diagnosis of OWT structures.