Marine spatial planning on the Caribbean island of Montserrat: Lessons for data-limited small islands

This repository contains code and data for:

Flower, J., Ramdeen, R., Estep, A., Thomas, L.R., Francis, S., Goldberg, G., Johnson, A.E., McClintock, W., Mendes, S.R., Mengerink, K., O’Garro, M., Rogers, L., Zischka, U. & Lester, S.E. (2020). Marine spatial planning on the Caribbean island of Montserrat: Lessons for data-limited small islands. Conservation Science and Practice, e158. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.158

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6731-8182

Content:

• data: Contains all data used in the prioritization and spatial boundaries shown in the figures.
• outputs: Contains all figures and data outputs from scripts
• scripts: Contains all data processing and analysis scripts, specifically:
  • marine_spatial_prioritization.R: this is the main code file. Running this code file will repeat the spatial prioritization discussed in the manuscript (see Figure 4. (a) for the result), as well as reproduce supplementary Figures S2, S3 and S5.
  • interp_sprichness.R: a script called from the main code file (above) that interpolates the species richness data.

Notes:

The systematic conservation prioritization package prioritizrused for the spatial prioritization uses the Gurobi library which requires a license. More information about installing Gurobi: https://prioritizr.net/articles/gurobi_installation.html

Other optimizers can be used to solve the prioritizr conservation problems: https://prioritizr.net/articles/saltspring.html#solving-the-problem

Update 2022-02-03

Added additional original (non-processed) data following a data request, so that data is publicly available in the future. Data files are in data directory:

• fish_pots_pts.gpkg - fishing pot locations as points. See paper Methods for how this data was used to create the fishing effort shown in Figure 3 (c). In WGS84 EPSG:4326 projection.
• fishing_value.tif - the fishing value layer from Figure S1 (b) in the Supplementary information. In WGS84 EPSG:4326 projection.
• habitat_map.gpkg - vector format habitat map, as shown in Figure 3 (a). In WGS84 EPSG:4326 projection.