No-Take Zones in the Galapagos Marine Reserve, Zoning plan 2000

The Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR) was created to protect the exceptional marine biodiversity it supports. It is a multi-use protected area where artisanal fishing, tourism and conservation are the main uses. In order to spatially regulate the different uses and ensure the conservation of the biodiversity, the first Zoning plan was created in 2000 classifying the coastline in sectors according to management/use subzones (fishing, tourism and conservation). Yet, no indication was stated as of how to resolve conflictive areas where several uses overlapped. To date, no study has addressed this issue despite the fact that the reserve has been in place for 20 years. This has created confusions in the compliance and enforcement of the reserve boundaries and complicates the calculation and analysis of take and no-take zones within the reserve. Here, I provide an interpretation of the subzoning of the reserve in order to resolve each of the conflictive areas following an objective set of rules which eventually allows the calculation of the areas open to fishing and the no-take zones. The resulting data set is a GIS layer (in ArcGIS shapefile format) of the GMR Zoning 2000 for the No-Take Zones (i.e. tourism and conservation). While a new Zoning plan is about to be effective soon, studies attempting to compare the effect of Take and No-Take Zones on target species and on the conservation of biodiversity during the 16-year period that the Zoning plan 2000 was in place as well as comparing Zoning 2000 with the new Zoning plan will benefit from this Dataset. This publication is contribution number 2194DS of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands.