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Tonga's Special Management Areas (SMAs) have been widely supported by the people of Tonga as a successful approach to the comanagement of their fisheries and marine resources. However, due to the dominant focus on expansion of the program over recent years, challenges remain for the effective and consistent monitoring and evaluation needed to understand program impacts. This review compiles all known ecological, fisheries, and socio-economic monitoring and evaluation reports related to Tonga's Special Management Areas from 2010 onwards. A total of 25 projects with available reports were identified, with most examining ecological (42%) and socio-economic (42%) aspects of SMAs, whereas reporting on SMA fisheries data (e.g. catch) was limited to five available projects. Most studies also represented 'baseline' ecological and socio-economic surveys of SMAs during implementation. Only three studies have assessed the ecological impact of SMAs post intervention, and only one of these incorporated 'follow-up' surveys at a second time point. Among these, impacts remain mixed, with some SMAs resulting in larger and more abundant fish, but others showing no impact. Other monitoring challenges include no gender disaggregation of data, no monitoring of gleaning, haphazard monitoring by communities, and general concerns of cost, fit for purpose, and overinvestment. Although the limited available ecological data indicates that SMAs can increase fish size and abundance in some cases, rationalised, more efficient, and targeted monitoring is required to better understand and strengthen the functioning of SMAs and inform community and government management decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This study assessed the use of novel, locally made, protective culture cylinders as a means of improving pearl oyster Pteria penguin performance and standardizing culture methods used by mabe [...]

During the planning phase the efficacy of different strategies to manage marine resources should ultimately be assessed by their potential impact, or ability to make a difference to ecological and social outcomes. While community‐based and systematic approaches to establishing marine protected areas have their strengths and weaknesses, comparisons of their effectiveness often fail to explicitly address potential impact. Here, we predict conservation impact to compare recently implemented community‐based marine reserves in Tonga to a systematic configuration specifically aimed at maximizing impact. Boosted regression tree outputs indicated that fishing pressure accounted for ∼24% of variation in target species biomass. We estimate that the community‐based approach provides 84% of the recovery potential of the configuration with the greatest potential impact. This high potential impact results from community‐based reserves being located close to villages, where fishing pressure is greatest. These results provide strong support for community‐based marine management, with short‐term benefits likely to accrue even where there is little scope for systematic reserve design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]