This story was originally published in the Santa Barbara Green Guide , a collaboration between the Independent and Bluedot Living.
An international study using satellite imagery and artificial intelligence revealed that many of the world’s marine protected areas, otherwise known as MPAs, are largely free of industrial fishing, upending a frequent argument among critics that these exclusion zones are merely political and performative and have little benefit.
“There’s a commonly held assumption that MPAs are just ‘paper parks,’” says Gavin McDonald, a senior project scientist at UC Santa Barbara. “However, we’ve found that for fully and highly protected MPAs, this is not the case.”