Examining the Conservation Level of Marine Management Areas within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary: How Protected is the Sanctuary?

The growing number of marine managed areas in state and federal waters of the US has created within selected stakeholder groups the impression that “everywhere is protected.” That impression has fueled debates on the east and west coasts as to whether any additional management is required, though important questions remain unanswered as to whether everywhere is indeed protected. To directly investigate the accuracy of the widely-held impression, we created a scoring system based on selected attributes of managed areas within the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (central California) to quantify the level of protection provided by each management area individually, as well as cumulatively in locations where multiple managed areas overlap.