Las áreas naturales protegidas con ambientes costero-marinos en Baja California Sur, México: representatividad y manejo.

In Mexico, Baja California Sur (BCS) occupies the second place in Protected Natural Areas (PNAs) with respect to its surface, representing 19% of the total; the majority of these PNAs are located in coastal zones in both the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. Although important coastal ecosystems are distributed in the State, accurate information about spatial distribution and coverage in the coastal ecoregions and the PNAs of BCS is not available. In the legal framework, some PNAs lack a Conservation and Management Program (CMP), and no efforts have been made to assess them. Thus, the objective of this study was to assess the current state of the PNAs with coastal and marine ecosystems, framed in a Human Generation period. The methodology consisted of defining the coastal zone, performing a supervised classification, establishing an ecosystem pattern, comparing several diversity indexes adapted to ecosystems, and designing a compliance index about the CMP according to the guidelines of the General Law of Ecological Equilibrium and Environment Protection (GLEEEP) taken as reference for a human generation. The results indicated that 11 coastal-marine ecosystems were distributed in BCS, highlighting mangrove (10% of its surface) as one of the ecosystems less represented in the PNA system. Ecosystem diversity in the ecoregions was best explained the by the Simpson and Hill Indexes, finding that the major ecosystem diversity was found in the Central Gulf Coast (Cc) and the Vizcaino Desert (Dv). The compliance index (IC, for its abbreviation in Spanish) is the ratio between the difference on the decree date and the creation of the protected area over the maximum years after the first PNA, which resulted as 2:0:3:1 for the six PNAs with PCM [for its abbreviation in Spanish within good, regular, bad and unacceptable levels. The reason why one of them showed unacceptable level was due to the lack of PCM since its creation, and one Human Generation has passed by since its decree. With all these elements, reliable references about representativeness of coastal ecosystems can be used to propose a decree for Magdalena Bay as a PNA, encourage decision makers to specify the missing CMP of one of the PNAs as well as those of others in the country. These actions are key to help conservation, and they represent tangible items as evidence for the policies of decision makers