Marine protection enhances the resilience of biological communities on temperate rocky reefs

Conservation science faces the urgent challenge of halting the biodiversity loss caused by the biological crisis of the present era. To achieve this, conservation science requires cutting-edge tools to focus on vital properties of ecosystems, such as the resilience. Resilience informs about the cost of recovering biological communities. Here, we developed a metric to quantify the communities ecological recovery cost based on the multidimensional distance between unprotected and partially protected communities from totally protected communities in Cabo de Gata Marine Reserve. Our results show that the biological community composed of fish, macroinvertebrates and cryptic fish, and macroalgae species in unprotected zones requires a higher ecological recovery cost than in partially protected zones when moving towards a fully protected community. This research contributes to monitoring marine the effectiveness of marine protection from a resilience perspective, with the goal of promoting the use of the recovery cost metric for building resilient coastal ecosystems.