Lyme Bay is a brilliant example of what can be achieved through a local community committed to defending their local environment. The movement to protect Lyme Bay’s ‘coral garden’ began with local divers and conservationists who banded together after witnessing the destruction of the seabed first-hand. From there the project has snowballed into a huge collaborative effort between NGOs, fishers, scientists and regulators. This new study goes some way to showing how they are all reaping the social and environmental benefits.
PhD candidate and lead author of the study
It’s not often we come across positive environmental stories, but the Lyme Bay MPA is definitely one of them. Witnessing the effort that goes into such a project has been really inspiring from the tireless work involved in managing and maintaining a huge ecological dataset, to the skill and local knowledge required by local fishers to guide our annual field surveys. It has been a real privilege to be involved, and is a great example of the collaboration needed to achieve real and positive change for our environment and the communities that rely on them.
Emma Sheehan
Associate Professor of Marine Ecology, and lead of the Lyme Bay Project
The Lyme Bay Reserve, at its best, brought significantly greater agreement between conservationists and fishermen than exists elsewhere and put the fishermen in the driving seat in deciding conservation methods. They are the experts on what works with the grain of fishing. The goodwill involved, unusual between fishermen and conservationists, brought about a significant recovery that would probably not have happened otherwise. There are many things still to tackle but Lyme Bay is an example of getting things right, most of the time, provided that a protected area which encompasses fishing is fished in a small-scale and sustainable way.
Blue Marine Foundation co-founder and senior advisor
By harnessing the knowledge and experience of local community stakeholders including fishermen, regulators and conservation groups, combined with long-term monitoring by scientists, the Lyme Bay Reserve has proven the success of adopting a “whole site” approach to protection of a marine ecosystem. Used as a best practice model around the UK and further afield to support sustainable inshore fisheries that are compatible with marine conservation and recovery, the Reserve will continue to play a leading role in influencing more effective management of inshore MPAs and proving the case for banning bottom towed gear within MPAs.
Senior UK Projects Manager at the Blue Marine Foundation
- The full study – Renn, Sheehan et al: Lessons from Lyme Bay (UK) to inform policy, management, and monitoring of Marine Protected Areas – is published in ICES Journal of Marine Science, DOI: 10.1093/icesjms/fsad204.
Monitoring the recovery of Lyme Bay
Our researchers have pioneered a whole-site approach that supports fishing communities while meeting international conservation goals
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