Spatial Analysis of Marine Protected Areas of the Persian Gulf and their Effectiveness in Protecting Coral Reefs

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Forough Goudarzi
Assistant professor, Shahid Beheshti University
10.22034/eiat.2026.238712
Abstract
Marine protected areas (MPAs) are designated by governments and other institutions to restrict access to marine environments to increase the resilience of fragile ecosystems such as coral reefs to disturbances, even when threats occur outside their geographic boundaries. In this study, quantitative information on protected areas in the Persian Gulf (PG) was reviewed and their effectiveness in protecting coral ecosystems as a vulnerable faunal taxon to human disturbances was examined. For this purpose, the geographical extent of marine protected areas in the PG was extracted from the Global Database of Protected Areas and supplemented with information on protected areas from the Iranian Department of Environment (DOE). Then, the percentage of spatial overlap of coral habitats with the network of MPA in the PG was calculated. Based on the analyses, there are 28 protected areas throughout the PG, all or part of which are located at sea. Their marine sector covers less than 7% of the PG, with half of these areas having an effective area of less than 100 Km2. After Oman with 70%, Bahrain with 18% provides the highest relative protection of the PG. Also, only 27% of the coral reefs of the PG are protected by the network of MPAs. According to the results, the marine protected areas in the PG are not sufficiently effective in protecting marine biodiversity in terms of their size and representativeness, and to achieve the target of 30% protection by 2030, the network of MPAs needs to be expanded by identifying ecologically important areas of the PG.
Keywords
Gap Analysis
30*30 goal
Persian Gulf
Coral reef
Subjects
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