PART II Science in Action: Working Examples of Marine GIS

Many of the most vexing problems and challenges of marine resource management and conservation turn on the interaction of human activities and communities with the marine environment. In the case of fisheries, recent management measures, such as habitat protection, fishing restrictions, and alternative area usages, are precipitated by fisheries declines and ecosystem-based management mandates, and require an integrated understanding of the resource and its users. Analytically, this challenge reduces to the need to link—through data and analysis—ocean ecosystems and human communities. In addition to the physical, geological and biological data collected and compiled by scientists to understand the ocean floors and water column, any analysis seeking to link the ocean environment to fishing activities and coastal communities must also include information on use patterns, economic statistics, and human behavior. With fisheries, essentially, the question becomes “where in the ocean are the resources, the fleets that harvest them, and the communities that depend on them?” The Ocean Communities “3E” Analysis (OCEAN) is a suite of geographic information systems, databases, and analyses designed to answer this question. Using the case of the West Coast groundfish fishery, we illustrate how multiple, heterogeneous datasets can be linked and interpreted for marine management applications, notably area-based management. OCEAN operates at an intermediate, regional scale, with explicit consideration of the socioeconomic impacts of management measures on coastal communities. The system can be queried from within any one data layer, for example, to find particular vessels or gear groups fishing in a habitat of Astrid Scholz, Mike Mertens, and Charles Steinback, Ecotrust, 721 NW 9th Avenue, Suite 200, Portland, OR 97209 Corresponding author: [email protected], phone 503-467-0758 The OCEAN Framework 71 interest, which we illustrate with trawl fishery in the coral and sponge habitat of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Information can be manipulated both in database formats and mapbased user interfaces, and results are plotted on maps.