Dear the SMART marine community,
I hope you don’t mind me reaching out to you but I was wondering if you would be so kind as to help with my research on illegal fishing within MPAs.
A little background about the project: I am a PhD student at the University of Exeter and Zoological Society of London conducting an online survey as part of my thesis. It’s aiming to understand the perceptions of drivers of illegal fishing activity within MPAs amongst the global MPA practitioner community to provide a synopsis of perceived threats to MPAs as well as better understand where future data collection efforts should focus. So far, the average response time for the survey is 10 - 15 minutes. The survey has three sections - the first section asks about experience as an MPA practitioner (how long you have worked on MPAs, locations etc). The second section asks for information about the MPA(s) you are associated with - things like age of MPA, size of MPA, permitted activities within the MPA, level of enforcement. The third section asks to perform a ranking exercise of the drivers of illegal fishing activity within this MPA(s) and for some additional information for those drivers deemed the most pertinent.
We are trying to get a truly global representation of respondents and would really appreciate your help in achieving this. As such, we were wondering if you might consider completing our survey or sharing our survey with MPA practitioners that you work with. By practitioner we mean somebody who has knowledge of how the MPA is managed. This could be people whose work involves the regulation or operation of an MPA or whose involved in advocacy, research or education about an MPA. The survey is available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish and the link is below which includes more information on the study:
Thank you so much in advance for helping me with this!
Chris