Recognition of the significant direct and collateral impacts that fishing imposes on marine ecosystems has encouraged adoption of ecosystem-based management (EBM, also referred to as the ecosystem approach to fisheries, EAF). This integrated approach considers the entire ecosystem, including

humans, and has as a main goal maintaining an ecosystem in a healthy, productive and resilient condition so that it can provide the services humans want and need [4] and [5]. Even though EBM has been recognized Obeticholic Acid clinical trial as a potentially powerful approach for rebuilding depleted marine fish populations and for restoring the ecosystems of which they are part [6], several challenges to its wide implementation must be addressed. One of the most important is a lack of clear, concrete and comprehensive guidelines that outline in a practical manner how EBM can be implemented in marine areas [7]. The EBM approach interacts closely with that of integrated management, which focuses on managing the multiple human uses of spatially-designated areas, and which is typically viewed as incorporating EBM as a fundamental component [8]. The idea is that since marine ecosystems are places, and human activities

affecting them (fisheries, tourism, marine transport, oil and gas exploitation, etc.) occur within those places, ecosystem-based management must be inherently place-based [9]. Hence, combining ideas of ecosystem-based management and

spatial management, the integrated approach PI3K inhibitor of ecosystem-based Levetiracetam spatial management, EBSM, has emerged over the last decade as a way to apply EBM in coastal and marine environments [10]. The main aim of EBSM (which in the marine context of this paper includes marine spatial planning, MSP) is to provide a mechanism for a strategic and integrated plan-based approach to manage current and potentially conflicting uses, to reduce the cumulative effects of human activities, to optimize sustainable socio-economic development and to deliver protection to biologically and ecologically sensitive marine areas [10]. This management approach has been successfully used in several marine areas of the world, with Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (GBRMP) considered a particularly successful example of its implementation [11] and [12]. An EBSM approach was adopted in the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR, Fig. 1) at the end of the 1990s. This occurred in order to deal with several ecological, socioeconomic and political challenges strongly related to the rapid growth of fishing and tourism activity in the archipelago [13] and [14]. The cornerstone for the application of an EBSM approach in the GMR was the adoption of marine zoning, a spatially explicit management tool that was designed, planned and implemented by a consensus-based participatory process between 1997 and 2006 [15] and [16].