|Title||Minimum data requirements for designing a set of marine
protected areas, using commonly available abiotic and biotic
datasets| |Publication Type||Journal Article| |Year of
Publication||2009| |Journal||Biodiversity and Conservation|
|Pagination||1829 - 1845| Marine protected areas (MPAs) can be
an effective tool for marine biodiversity conservation, yet
decision-makers usually have limited and biased datasets with
which to make decisions about where to locate MPAs. Using
commonly available abiotic and biotic datasets, I asked how many
datasets are necessary to achieve robust patterns of
conservation importance. I applied a decision support tool for
marine protected area design in two regions of British Columbia,
Canada, and sequentially excluded the datasets with the most
limited geographic distribution. I found that the reserve
selection method was robust to some missing datasets. The
removal of up to 15 of the most geographically limited datasets
did not significantly change the geographic patterns o