Résumé
The objectives of marine protected areas (MPA), such as Reunion’s Marine Reserve founded in 2007, are (i) protect habitats (ecosystems) and resources (biodiversity) from increasing pressure due to a major urban, economic and recreational development; ii) manage uses and conflicts between traditional fisheries, spear-fishing, diving and recreational activities inside the coastal zone. These goals necessitate monitoring tools such as indicators and diagnostics. The PAMPA programme involves seven MPA including the Natural Marine Reserve of La Reunion (RNMR). It aims for each site to identify and validate indicators according to management objectives and group them in a MPA performance dashboard. This panel will help to visualize temporal trends and define threshold values between different levels of MPA performance. The data used in the analysis are related to natural resources and biodiversity (corals, fish, habitats), uses (traditional fishing, recreational and commercial) and governance (administrative and financial data, users perception surveys). The assemblage of data involved the definition of a common species classification scheme, the compilation of geographic distribution data and the harmonisation of databases to allow cross-analysis. For resources and biodiversity data, the long-term monitoring settled up since 1998 (GCRMN) had allowed testing indicators and the implementation of a dashboard with trends, thresholds and performance classes for each site. For uses and governance data, as monitoring and surveys are recent, little information were implemented on the dashboard. But the approach developed on the program had allowed to target the relevant indicators and to initiate a long-term monitoring necessary to complete the dashboard that will allow monitoring of various performance indicators over time. Continuous cooperation between managers and scientists throughout the project, around RNMR and with other MPA sites, allowed a permanent transfer of the program’s progress towards managers. They were able to integrate the results of the programme to define the framework of the RNMR management plan (2011-2015).