SAN DIEGO — Saving both fish and the fishermen who depend on them appears to come down to one thing: location, location, location.

Marine protected areas, which currently limit fishing in 1.6 percent of the waters claimed by countries, need to be located in the right spots to have the maximum effect, researchers report. The work comes in a suite of papers published online February 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 21.

In the Black Sea, for instance, setting aside just 20 to 30 percent of the most affected areas within marine reserves could accomplish nearly all the goals of protecting the entire reserve, reports a team led by Benjamin Halpern, a marine scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif. This suggests that precisely placing the reserves, he