Data for: A tide of change – what we can learn from stories of marine conservation success

Rapid deterioration of marine habitats and biodiversity under cumulative stressors have led to increased efforts to rebuild marine life. Yet, successes of such endeavors do not have prominent visibility in recent assessments, although these examples are particularly needed to guide future actions to achieve our shared aspiration of a healthy ocean. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessment of 217 verified marine conservation successes across the world’s oceans and the main traits involved. Our findings reveal a balanced geography of success across the world’s oceans and that human stewardship is essential for driving conservation success, especially when different stakeholders work together in rebuilding marine life. This assessment should inform future actions and build confidence that reversing the trajectory of loss towards repairing ocean health is feasible. It also provides a basis for a ‘learning by doing’ approach in guiding conservation success through an understanding of the ..., Retrieval of relevant reports
For this dataset, the reports on marine conservation successes, which caused a significant positive change of an ecosystem component towards a previously documented state, were drawn from different sources (i.e., peer-reviewed publications, proceedings, dissertations, books, technical reports, popular science magazines, and grey literature).
For the geographically-distributed search we used various combinations of the keywords ‘recovery’ AND/OR ‘stock increase’ AND/OR ‘population increase’ together with keywords for the respective, different ocean components (such as ‘reef’, ‘mangrove’, or ‘whale’) to retrieve relevant reports from the major literature databases, i.e., Web-of- Science, Google Scholar, JSTOR, PubMed and ScienceDirect. In addition, we used the ‘snowball’ sampling approach, where we manually searched the reference lists of the relevant publications on marine conservation successes to retrieve additional sources. We also further used a stratifi...,