Social–ecological drivers of marine protected area connectivity: Integrating human resistance and governance response in Chinese White dolphin habitat networks

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are central to biodiversity conservation, but modelled corridor connectivity in densely used coastal waters can be constrained by dynamic maritime pressure. This study develops a social–ecological connectivity framework that integrates automatic identification system (AIS)-derived maritime activity as social resistance and a budget-based indicator of management-resource availability as governance response. Using the Pearl River estuary, China, and a fixed set of 35 Chinese white dolphin ( Sousa chinensis ) habitat-use hotspots, we constructed annual least-cost-path corridor networks for 2017–2021 and estimated temporal exponential random graph models. Annual corridor-cost summaries were highest in 2019 and partially eased in 2020. Social resistance was negatively associated with corridor-tie formation, whereas budget-based governance response showed a positive conditional association. A complementary node-level analysis identified recurrent structural–ecological mismatch at PID16, PID14, PID03, and PID07, among other candidate sites for monitoring and management review. These mismatches do not by themselves demonstrate ecological underperformance or governance failure, because low local habitat-use intensity may also occur at transit locations and may be affected by survey effort. The integrated edge- and node-level framework is therefore best used as a diagnostic and hypothesis-generating tool for linking AIS monitoring with targeted ecological verification in human-dominated coastal seascapes