Marine protected areas (MPAs) are used for biodiversity conservation and Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to use them together with other effective area-based conservation measures to protect 30 % of the ocean by 2030. Scientific evidence shows that most positive outcomes are dependent on full protection, where all extractive activities are banned. Yet, most of what is being protected is under partial protection, with often heterogeneous levels of protection. Here, we assess the protection level based on fishing regulations of 27 Spanish Mediterranean nationally and regionally designated MPAs and identify the fishing gears allowed within the partially protected areas. The level of protection from fishing is assigned based on the number of allowed fishing gears within MPA borders and their potential ecological impact. Approximately 0.8 % of the total area of the Spanish Mediterranean Sea is covered by the included MPAs, of which 63 % is incompatible with the conservation of nature and 7 % is fully or highly protected. Our results show that the composition of allowed gears varies across partially protected areas within the same level of protection (i.e. lightly protected areas) and regions. Including the reasoning behind specific gear restrictions on fishing regulations that apply to each MPA could help to understand the context of each MPA, and improve MPA effectiveness. Our study contributes to illustrate the suboptimal current situation of marine protection in the Spanish Mediterranean Sea and the need to increase effective protection efforts to achieve area-based conservation targets

We also acknowledge partial funding from the EU Grant Agreement 869300 – (FutureMares project) and EU GA 101059407 (MarinePlan project). Further, we also would like to acknowledge institutional support by the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019–000928-S). María D. Castro-Cadenas acknowledges the FPU grant of the Spanish Ministry of Universities (reference FPU20/04852). Maria Bas was supported by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and NextGenerationEU/PRTR, Grant no. FJC2020-043762-I. Joachim Claudet thanks Fondation de France (MultiNet), Biodiversa (MOVE and METRODIVER), and the European Commission (MARHAB) for financial support. Valerio Sbragaglia is supported by a “Ramón y Cajal” research fellowships (RYC2021-033065-I) granted by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation

10 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, supplementary material .-- Data availability: The data that supports the findings of this study are available in DigitalCSIC at: https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/384068. It contains MPA zoning, surface and level of protection for the target MPAs in shapefile format. Further information can be found in the Appendix

Peer reviewed