This thesis explores the implications of population-level and
community-level life history variation for the effective design of
marine reserve networks. Specifically, it uses a suite of models
to investigate how reserve protection and fisheries impacts vary
with growth, reproduction, and dispersal within and across
populations, which has the potential to alter selection pressure
and community structure.

First, I explore the potential for reserves to protect against
fisheries-based selection for earlier maturity within populations,
which threatens population persistence and fisheries
sustainability. Model results indicate that reserves have the
potential to protect against anthropogenic selection; protection
through reserves appears more robust to environmental and
scientific uncertainty compared to protection offered by
traditional fisheries management.

Second, I investigate the potential for community interactions
with unfished species to impede the recovery of larger, later-
maturing fished species after the establishment of reserves.
According to the model, trophic and competitive dynamics alter
reserve design criteria necessary to recover overfished species
that previously dominated marine systems, and therefore
ecosystem structure: recovering overfished species requires
larger reserves and placing reserves in locations with high and
low densities of larger and smaller species, respectively.

Third, I explore how interactions between species across the
dispersal scales in marine communities affect reserve design
through a synthesis of marine reserve community models,
community models with habitat degradation, and new model
extensions. This synthesis demonstrates that accounting for
species interactions often leads to larger reserves necessary to
protect populations; reserve design should be based on a variety
of species, especially specialists, inferior colonizers, and long-
distance dispersers; and harvest outside reserves and before
reserve establishment as well as movement dynamics are critical
to effective reserve design.

Finally, I investigate whether fragmenting a landscape into
reserve networks may change selection pressure on dispersal
distance within populations. Model results indicate that habitat
fragmentation generally shifts evolutionarily stable strategies
toward reduced dispersal, depending on the primary selective
forces acting on dispersal and the dynamics outside reserves.

Overall, this set of models provides qualitative predictions for
how to design marine reserve networks that protect ecosystem
structure and sustainable fisheries.

Future research will build on the models developed in this thesis
to further explore marine conservation topics involving rapid
evolutionary changes and shifts in community composition in
response to anthropogenic impacts such as climate change.
More information is available at http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/
~mbaskett/ .