Marine Conservation - Developing Tools for Marine Management

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With your help, we can conserve marine habitat around the world for people and nature.

E-BM Resources

Ecosystem-Based Management Toolkit provides guidance for marine managers in the use of common tools for regional assessments and planning with case studies addressing multiple objectives in biodiversity conservation, fishery production and coastal hazard mitigation.

Conservation by Design Gateway
The gateway is an interactive website designed to help all conservation practitioners affect conservation change in their countries or communities. It includes information on global science indicators, ecoregional assessments, and conservation action planning.

The world's coasts and oceans support an enormous amount of marine biodiversity and provide billions of dollars worth of services to humans - from nutrient cycling to fisheries production. But with increasing threats to our oceans and coasts, better and new approaches to management are needed.

Ecosystem-based management (E-BM) is a developing field that advances work:

at ecologically relevant scales,
across multiple sectors or management objectives, and
by integrating people as part of the seascape.

The goal of E-BM is to maintain ecosystems in healthy, productive and resilient conditions. Unlike traditional approaches, E-BM takes a variety of factors into consideration to address both the needs of nature and humans in target areas.

Because of the complexity of marine ecosystems and the diversity of human benefits they provide, marine E-BM can be difficult to implement but many organizations and scientists agree that this approach is essential to future management.

How the Conservancy Is Advancing Marine E-BM

The Nature Conservancy works to protect the Earth's diversity for both future human generations and the long-term sustainable use of ocean and coastal resources.

With partners, the Conservancy developed a Web-based toolkit that provides guidance for managers and practitioners in applying E-BM. The aim of this toolkit is to guide managers and practitioners in the use of common tools for regional planning and use case studies to illustrate E-BM approaches. Case studies include:

Hazards Case Study: Combines different tools to find solutions that help conserve diversity and reduce storm hazards to human communities in the Panhandle of Florida.
Fisheries Case Study: Explores new methods to combine Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) and Marxan to meet both fisheries and biodiversity objectives.

The approaches used in the toolkit case studies are also being advanced in the field:

We are helping to create better management policies in the Birds Head region of Indonesia by using E-BM with partners to help local communities meet multiple objectives, such as fishery and biodiversity conservation.
In Venezuela, we are providing technical support to partners to identify sensitive marine ecosystems and provide conservation guidelines for 64,000 square miles of the Caribbean that are being prospected for oil and gas.

The Conservancy is testing E-BM approaches on the ground and in the water. We are identifying and promoting new approaches to improve management by working with diverse partners to apply our innovative strategies and science-driven methods.