Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Africa water, Sanitation Mar- Apr 2015 Vol.10 No.2 | Page 28

Research

Sea change for ocean resource management
“Managers are trying to put more
dynamic approaches into place to protect
leatherbacks and other species, and this
is what we identify in this paper,” said
Maxwell.
Lewison, Maxwell and their colleagues at
the Center for Ocean Solutions, Stanford
University, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, and several
other universities, argue for an approach
that better incorporates real-time
information from satellite data, ocean
monitoring arrays, climate fluctuations
and crowd-sourced reports from ocean
users into applications that advance both
conservation and sustainable resource
use.

O

cean ecosystems around the world are threatened
by overfishing, extensive shipping routes, energy
exploration, pollution and other consequences of oceanbased industry. Data exist that could help protect these
vulnerable ecosystems, but current management strategies
often can’t react quickly enough to new information, said
San Diego State University biologist Rebecca Lewison.
She and colleagues from several other academic,
governmental and non-governmental organizations
endorse a new approach called “dynamic ocean
management” in a paper published in the journal
BioScience.
“Dynamic ocean management is an exciting comingtogether of science and management,” said Lewison,
one of the project’s lead scientists. “It captures the best
available science and directs it to meet the needs of
resource managers and industry. What’s exciting about
this research is that it puts science to work, fundamentally
changing the way we manage oceans.”
Traditional ocean management strategies tend to be
static, Lewison explained, with fixed boundaries in space
and time. Unfortunately, there’s often a sizable lag time
between what scientists and ocean users know and when
that knowledge is applied to management policies.
For example, consider California’s leatherback sea turtles.
Research on this endangered species is critical, said Sara
Maxwell, an ecologist at Old Dominion University and
another lead scientist on the project. There are numerous
protected marine areas for these animals, but if the
turtles shift their habitats, the protective policies lose their
effectiveness.

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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • March - April 2015

With support from NASA and the
Center for Ocean Solutions, Lewison and her colleagues
are working to develop approaches through which ocean
managers and industry work together, using real-time
information to better manage resources. However, the
success of this project will depend on cooperation from
the industries that use ocean’s resources--both in terms of
contributing data and following the guidelines based on
that information.
Fortunately, Lewison said, dynamic ocean management
is often in line with profit goals of industries such as
shipping and fishing. For example, scallop fisheries on the
U.S. Atlantic coast have a regulated quota for the amount
of bycatch or, accidentally caught animals. Once they hit
that quota, the lucrative scallop fishing grounds are closed.
The fisheries are motivated from a profitability standpoint
to avoid bycatch, which also helps protect the ecosystems
they work in.
Working with university partners, these scallop fisheries
have developed a system for reporting where and how
much bycatch they bring in, then feeding that information
into a map. The next day, scallop fishers receive these
maps so they know where they can bring in more scallops
and less bycatch.
Lewison and her colleagues are aiming for that kind
of cooperation on a much wider scale across multiple
industries.
“We want dynamic ocean management to be an industry
standard,” she said. “We’re bringing ocean management
into the 21st century. We know too much about the world
now to keep managing the ocean in the same old way.”
Source: San Diego State University