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Author(s): Cannizzo, Zachary J.; Lausche, Barbara; Wenzel, Lauren | Abstract: The incorporation of ecological connectivity, the unimpeded movement of species and the flow of natural processes that sustain life on Earth, into protected area design and management is critical to achieving conservation outcomes. However, the understanding and implementation of ecological connectivity in marine protected areas (MPAs) lags behind that of their terrestrial counterparts. Here, we highlight the important role of ecological connectivity in the design and management of MPA networks through an introduction to marine connectivity and the challenges and benefits of incorporating it into management. The paper also provides guidance for policy and practice, including “rules of thumb” for incorporating connectivity into MPA design and management, and case studies. MPA managers have the potential to increase the effectiveness, adaptability, and resilience of the resources under their stewardship through the purposeful incorporation of ecological connectivity into MPA design and management.

This paper provides empirical and experimental assessments of thematic knowledge discourses based on two case studies in the US Virgin Islands and Florida. We utilize a latent semantic indexing analysis over natural language corpus to classify and categorize knowledge categories. We computed TF*IDF scores and associated co-occurrence Jaccard similarity scores to construct semantic knowledge networks. Using network analysis, we computed structural metrics over four composite groups: neighbor-based, centrality, equivalence and position. The analysis show that structural network characteristics of environmental knowledge can exponentially predict associations between knowledge categories. We show that connectivity play a critical role on acquisition, representation, and diffusion patterns of knowledge within local communities. We provide evidence of a global prevalence of a shared knowledge core. We show that core social-ecological attributes of knowledge follow scale-free, power law distributions and stable, equilibrium network structures. We identify two distinct models of bidirectional translation: a bottom-up and a top-down.