Figure 4. Relationships between national dependency on coastal fisheries and conservation effort or larval supply from marine reserves.

The national dependency on coastal fisheries is calculated through unit-free indices bounded between 0 and 100 that estimate the economic (a,d,g, n=199), employment (b,e,h, n=144) and food security (c,f,i, n=139) dependency. Colours reflect the fisheries dependency, with darker pink representing higher dependency and lighter pink representing lower dependency. The violin plots in (d–f) compare the extent of protected coastal areas (measured as the percentage of EEZs in MRs) among countries grouped by the level of fisheries dependency. The violin plots in (g–i) compare the larval density from MRs among countries grouped by the level of fisheries dependency. The statistics under the plots show the results of a Kruskal–Wallis test. For both economic and food security dependency, the significant difference in area protected (d,f) is due to the difference between low and medium dependency classes (Conover post hoc test, t=2.6, P=0.03 and t=2.9, P=0.01, respectively). The significant difference in larval supply among food security dependency classes (i) is due to the differences between the high dependency class and the medium (t=2.4, P=0.02) and low (t=3.2, P<0.01) dependency classes.