Marine reserve design and life history variation

This thesis explores the implications of population-level and community-level life history variation for the effective design of marine reserve networks. Specifically, it uses a suite of models to investigate how reserve protection and fisheries impacts vary with growth, reproduction, and dispersal within and across populations, which has the potential to alter selection pressure and community structure.;First, I explore the potential for reserves to protect against fisheries-based selection for earlier maturity within populations, which threatens population persistence and fisheries sustainability. Model results indicate that reserves have the potential to protect against anthropogenic selection; protection through reserves appears more robust to environmental and scientific uncertainty compared to protection offered by traditional fisheries management.;Second, I investigate the potential for community interactions with unfished species to impede the recovery of larger, later-maturing fished species after the establishment of reserves. According to the model, trophic and competitive dynamics alter reserve design criteria necessary to recover overfished species that previously dominated marine systems, and therefore ecosystem structure: recovering overfished species requires larger reserves and placing reserves in locations with high and low densities of larger and smaller species, respectively.;Third, I explore how interactions between species across the dispersal scales in marine communities affect reserve design through a synthesis of marine reserve community models, community models with habitat degradation, and new model extensions. This synthesis demonstrates that accounting for species interactions often leads to larger reserves necessary to protect populations; reserve design should be based on a variety of species, especially specialists, inferior colonizers, and long-distance dispersers; and harvest outside reserves and before reserve establishment as well as movement dynamics are critical to effective reserve design.;Finally, I investigate whether fragmenting a landscape into reserve networks may change selection pressure on dispersal distance within populations. Model results indicate that habitat fragmentation generally shifts evolutionarily stable strategies toward reduced dispersal, depending on the primary selective forces acting on dispersal and the dynamics outside reserves.;Overall, this set of models provides qualitative predictions for how to design marine reserve networks that protect ecosystem structure and sustainable fisheries.