Ocean Zoning Discussion Forum

From: SitNews.US

By LAINE WELCH  

March 26, 2011

Alaska Senator Mark Begich is quick to name the issue that’s giving him the biggest earful so far in his new post as Chairman of the Commerce Subcommittee on Oceans, Fisheries, and Coast Guard: “marine spatial planning.”  

The concept is listed as a top priority by the 2010 National Ocean’s Council which is already preparing to draft action plans on nine coastal/ocean objectives. It would affect all users and uses, on and beneath the oceans.

“I hear it over and over again,” Sen. Begich said in a phone call from D.C. “Let’s call it like it is, pure and simple – ocean zoning.” 

“I don’t think Dr. Lubchenco, the director of NOAA, appreciated my blunt categorization of it,” Begich added, “but as a former mayor, that’s what it is. You  are determining winners and losers in terms of utilization of the oceans, and that is what zoning does. 

 “What is the value in it?  And by what authority are they able to do this?”  he continued. “In land use zoning there is a whole process you must go through by law.  Here they are talking ocean zoning but there has yet to be any stakeholder involvement or economic analysis.”

A tool called the Multipurpose Marine Cadastre provides baseline information needed for marine spatial planning efforts around the U.S., particularly those that involve finding the best location for renewable energy projects.

Users of this interactive tool can pick the ocean geography of their choosing and see information about:

– Jurisdictional boundaries and limits, including marine protected areas and federal fishery management areas;

– Federal georegulations, such as Clean Water Act Section 402 and the Endangered Species Act;

– Federal agency regions, such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National Park Service;

– Navigation and marine infrastructure, including oil and natural gas wells and transmission lines;

– Human use, such as proposed California hydrokinetic sites;

– Marine habitat and biodiversity, such as the Marine Mammal Protection Act; and

– Geology and seafloor, including undersea feature place names and bathymetric contours.

The tool features a map of the U.S. marked with the contiguous zone, exclusive economic zone, revenue sharing boundary, state seaward boundary, and territorial sea.

The Multipurpose Marine Cadastre allows users to perform measurements (distance and area) and draw boundaries using nautical miles, statute miles, and kilometers. Users can plot coordinates of latitude and longitude.

From: Bangor Daily News

From: SouthCoastToday.com

It’s widely agreed that good fisheries regulation demands good science. We need to know how many fish are out there and what is happening to them.

But gaps in the science have spawned disputes between fishermen and regulators in the Northeast and, in response, fisheries scientists are offering a radically different approach to the way groundfish stocks are evaluated and managed.

Regulation is obsolete as it is now practiced, according to Steve Cadrin, associate professor at UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology.

“Fisheries management based on single species population dynamics goes back to the 1950s,” said Cadrin, who also serves on the New England Fishery Management Council’s science and statistical committee.

But this fishery is multi-species, and single-species methods miss plenty and can be oversimplified and misleading, he said.

“If you sample the removals from a population and the age structure, you can get a good sense of a fish stock and how hard you can fish it,” he said. “But that simply ignores other species who are eating and being eaten by a single stock. And it also ignores the many environmental variables, such as hot years and cold years and times of high or low salinity.”

From: FIS.com

From 31 January to 2 February, more than 700 conferees from 30 countries convened at Seafood Summit 2011 in Vancouver, Bristish Colombia (BC). There they wrestled with how to improve the sustainability of commercial fishing and aquaculture.

Now in its ninth year, the event drew 40 per cent of its attendees from the seafood business. Industry personnel joined conservationists, researchers, and government officials in discussing a range of sustainability issues – marine spatial planning, traceability shortcomings, and next-generation aquaculture among them.

The toughest item on the agenda may well have been ocean acidification, which only recently has emerged as a major issue to those concerned with food security and the productivity of our seas.

Scientific and journalistic coverage of this problem has exploded; a search on Google Scholar shows more than 25,700 articles, most of them published since 2006.

Acidification results from CO2 in the atmosphere combining with sea water to form carbonic acid. The oceans absorb about a third of human society’s CO2 emissions every year.

Since the Industrial Revolution began, the ocean’s chemistry has changed hundreds of times more rapidly than in the 650,000 years that preceded it.