01:00 AM EDT on Friday, April 9, 2010

By GROVER FUGATE

In early 1983, Rhode Island became a national leader when it adopted a comprehensive management plan for its coastal waters. Now the Ocean State is once again leading the way.

Rhode Island is on the cutting edge of managing offshore waters. As part of that effort it could well have the nation’s first utility-scale offshore renewable energy from wind turbines.

The project putting the state in the spotlight is the Ocean Special Area Management Plan (Ocean SAMP). This is a two-year comprehensive research and planning process to promote development and protection of Rhode Island ocean-based resources.

This team effort is being led by the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC), in partnership with the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island Sea Grant and nationally renowned scientists at the University of Rhode Island (URI).

Ocean SAMP is an ecosystem-based planning process designed to get out in front of increasing development pressure on our ocean waters by first understanding existing conditions and then identifying best uses in the area and opportunities for protection.

This planning will designate offshore waters to enhance high-priority uses, such as commercial and recreational fishing and other marine trades; to protect fish, birds and other marine animals; and to encourage new marine-based economic development, such as offshore renewable-energy infrastructure.

Until the SAMP, our understanding of Block Island and Rhode Island sounds was much more limited. Now we are learning many new things that improve our understanding and hence our management — everything from who uses these waters and how they do so, to their importance to bird populations.

For example, bird experts have found that the number of sea ducks wintering in the Ocean SAMP area is much lower than in Horseshoe Shoal, in Nantucket Sound, site of the controversial Cape Wind project.

And scientists have gained much new understanding of the dynamic ocean bottom in the SAMP area — geological and other understanding that is changing the understanding of how the area was formed and what is occurring on the ocean floor. This has implications for, among other things, productivity of fisheries. Other discoveries await.

The state has the experience and expertise that others do not. SAMP is a very complex — and exciting — process with implications for global climate change and state/federal interagency coordination. Rhode Island has leading scientists at URI on its Ocean SAMP team, and its coastal managers — from CRMC, URI Coastal Resources Center and Rhode Island Sea Grant — have been developing successful SAMPs around the world, as well as locally, for 30 years.

The state is a laboratory for testing new management and marine spatial-planning tools. This will help enable the extensive monitoring to be applied to the proposed pilot wind-turbine project off Block Island.

Many interested in ocean planning will come to Rhode Island to learn from the best. Already the SAMP team has been invited to Washington, D.C., many times to brief government officials charged with creating a national ocean planning process.

The prominence of the Ocean SAMP work was evident last fall, when the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force made Rhode Island one of its key stops on a fact-finding mission. When the group issued its draft national report last December, the Ocean SAMP was specifically referenced as an “existing effort that [c]ould help shape the [national] plan.”

Among the many factors contributing to Rhode Island’s success is that the state has an agency dedicated to coastal management — the CRMC — and has centralized many of the functions relating to coastal management in this agency. Another unusual factor is the relationship the CRMC shares with Sea Grant. No other state has quite this pairing and its impact on success of the program is evident.

Currently, initial chapters focusing on recreation, tourism and marine transportation are being vetted by technical advisory committees and shaped by comments from the Ocean SAMP stakeholders group and the public.

The completed document is due in late summer.

We encourage participation by all Rhode Islanders in reviewing the findings and contributing to this ambitious project then.

Grover Fugate is executive director of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council. This is also signed by Dennis Nixon and Sam DeBow, of the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, Malcolm Spaulding, of URI’s Ocean Engineering program, and Jennifer McCann, of URI’s Coastal Resource Center/Rhode Island Sea Grant. See seagrant.gso.uri.edu/oceansamp for further information.