Fisheries management and conservation 173
reef habitat. As time-series coral reef data are not currently available for the Myeik Archipelago, this will help fill the knowledge gap for this area. To date, Fauna & Flora’s work in the Myeik Archipelago
FIG. 2 Summary of the locally managed marine area development process adopted by Fauna & Flora in Myanmar. Starting with an ecological and socio-economic baseline assessment in the villages of Done Pale Aw, Lin Lon and Langann (Fig. 1), the process then focused on extensive community consultations, which led to an initial draft of rules and regulations. The draft was submitted to communities for a final review, which, following minor revisions, was adopted as the final document. This was then submitted to the Department of Fisheries, which issued an official designation through a Notification of the Fisheries Director General.
fisheries management areas will be established in the Myeik Archipelago and across other coastal areas of Myanmar. One critical component of implementing locallymanaged
marine areas is annual coral reef monitoring, which is con- ducted to track temporal changes in benthic and reef fish communities and thus examine reef ecosystem resilience. This is crucial to informadaptivemanagement of these habi- tats by local communities, particularly for economically im- portant fish species. In February 2019, the first permanent reef monitoring transects were installed at four sites within Lin Lon, and the first annual surveys of benthic and fish com- munitieswere conducted. Substrate, mobile invertebrate, reef fish and reef impact (e.g. fromghost gear and dynamite dam- age) data are collected using amodification of the ReefCheck method (Hodgson et al., 2006). The plan is that permanent transects, with annual mon-
itoring, will be established at every subsequently created locally managed marine area that includes suitable coral
has sought to utilize locally managed marine areas as a col- laborative management tool to achieve sustainable fisheries and effective, equitable marine conservation. The perceived value of this approach among participating communities was evident when socio-economic surveys were conducted in 2016, with 88% of survey respondents expressing a posi- tive view of the locally managed marine areas. These results were confirmed in 2019, when the survey was replicated, 2 years after the official designation. In both cases, commu- nity representatives were asked if the locally managed mar- ine area model could be beneficial to their livelihoods and if they were generally happy with how the locally managed marine area was being managed. This has subsequently encouraged more communities to be positively engaged, driving the scaling-up of this local management approach. Anecdotal evidence suggests reductions in destructive fish- ing within the established locally managed marine areas, particularly dynamite fishing, although continued monitor- ing is required to confirm this. While coral reef baselines are still being established, however, it is too soon to discern any ecological impact of the implementation of these locally managed marine areas. It is therefore important that long- term ecological monitoring continues, to track changes in marine ecosystems and examine the effectiveness of community-driven management as a viable approach for fisheries sustainability and marine conservation. Scientific research within these locally managed marine areas will also continue to fill an important information gap in a poorly researched region of global marine conservation im- portance (Howard, 2018).
Acknowledgements We thank The Arcadia Fund and Fondation Ensemble for funding this work; Myeik University for their collabo- rative work on the project; the locally managed marine area commu- nities at Langann, Done Pale Aw and Lin Lon; Myo Myint Aung of Fauna & Flora for the map figure, and the Fauna & Flora staff who have worked on this project over many years.
Author contributions Study design and fieldwork: ST, KZ, MA, STA, SMNNL, FC, HD; writing: HD.
Conflicts of interest None.
Ethical standards This research did not involve human subjects, ex- perimentation with animals or collection of specimens, and abided by the Oryx guidelines on ethical standards.
References
BECKER, H., LEE-BROOKS,K.&GRINDLEY,M.(2017) Final Technical Report: Establishment of a Ridge-to-Reef Conservation Programme for the Tanintharyi Landscape, Myanmar. Fauna & Flora International, Cambridge, UK.
Oryx, 2023, 57(2), 171–174 © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605322001193
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