Are Brazilian marine protected areas repositories of threatened species?

Although Brazil has one of the world’s largest systems of protected areas, we do not know to what extent its marine protected areas (MPAs) are functioning as repositories of threatened species. Here we synthesized governmental and scientific information on the country's 75 federal MPAs to assess whether their size, age, protection group, visitation and management effectiveness affect the number of threatened animal species present within their boundaries. The MPAs harbored 133 threatened species, which corresponds to 78.2% of the 170 threatened marine animal species listed for the country. On average, there were 10.1 threatened species per MPA (varying from 1 to 48), but 13 MPAs did not report any. As expected, the number of threatened species was greater in no-take, larger, and older MPAs with management plan. The MPA effectiveness index averaged 0.55 (0.43–0.74), indicating moderate effectiveness for the entire federal system. The level of management effectiveness in 2022 and the visitation accumulated between 2012 and 2021 did not significantly affect the number of threatened species. Our results demonstrate that Brazilian MPAs do serve as repositories for threatened animal species, but reveal serious bottlenecks in the management of official databases, dissemination of information to society, and biodiversity inventory and monitoring. We recommend (i) improvements in working conditions for MPA officials; (ii) advances in data management and publicization; (iii) partnerships of MPA managers with universities, research institutions, and non-governmental organizations; and (iv) the development of a broad, long-term biodiversity monitoring program.