| Marine Protected Areas (MPA) are often contemplated as a tool for the sustainable management of exploited resources and ecosystem conservation. This paper proposes an approach to establish a statistical diagnostic of the effects of MPAs on fish assemblages, and define corresponding ecological indicators. This requires choosing relevant variables (abundance, diversity, demographic parameters..) and appropriate statistical methods. The study was based on data from the Abore reef Reserve in New Caledonia. Two sets of methods: 1-inferential linear models (ANOVA, GLM): 2- Partial Least Squares (PLS) methods of regression, were used to test the effects of this MPA. PLS enabled us to test simultaneously within a model, density, species richness, biomass and mean... |
