SPECIAL SESSION: GIS in Support of Marine Protected Areas, Reserves and Sanctuaries I and II
organized by D. Wright (OrSt) and B. Walker (UCSB)
co-sponsored by the GIS, Remote Sensing, and Coastal and Marine Geography Specialty GroupsAssociation of American Geographers Annual Meeting
Los Angeles, March 23, 2002
2:00-3:40 p.m. and 4:00-5:40 p.m., Los Cerritos RoomCurrently more than 200 million acres of terrestrial wilderness and national parks in the U.S. have been designated as off limits to mining, logging, and vehicular traffic, whereas only 50 square miles of coastal areas enjoy similar projection. Last year President Clinton issued an executive order directing federal agencies to develop a network of "ocean conservation areas" aimed at protecting and preserving the nation's beaches, coasts and ocean resources. This session will discuss the role that GIS has played or should play in exploring, designating, managing, and/or modelling marine sanctuaries, protected areas, and reserves. One goal is to discuss how improvements can be made in GIS to serve marine/coastal applications, while also improving marine/coastal science and methods with the informed use of GIS. This series of papers is a continuation of the inaugural session of the same theme, held last year at AAG in New York.
Session 1
The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS) was established in 1992 to protect and manage the resources of a 13,760 sq km (5300 sq mi) area off the coast of central California. Seafloor mapping and sampling in the continental shelf areas (about 20% of the sanctuary area) have revealed new details about the geology, morphology, and active geologic and oceanographic processes of this region. Data from sidescan sonar, multibeam sonar bathymetry and backscatter, physical samples, and instrument moorings are consolidated with new and existing maps in a geographic information system (GIS). The GIS provides researchers and policymakers a view of the relationship among data sets to assist science studies and to help with economic and social policy-making decisions regarding this protected environment.
The data were compiled in ArcInfo, a commercial GIS, in the UTM Zone 10 coordinate system with datum NAD83. Raster data layers are in ArcInfo GRID format or are registered TIFF images. Point, line, and polygon features are in ArcInfo COVERAGE format. Shapefiles were generated for those coverages where the shape format did not degrade the data excessively. Each data layer is accompanied by FGDC-compliant metadata and an overview map. The GIS is now available online at geopubs.wr.usgs.gov/open-file/of01-179.
The white abalone has been recently listed as an endangered species.
Establishing refugia has been suggested as the final necessary step in
the process of restoring a self replacing population. The white
abalone's historic geographic range extended from Point Conception south
to Punto Eugenia, Baja California in water depths from 25 to 60 m,
on rocky substrate near a rock/sand interface. The distribution of
habitat is not well known since the underwater equivalent of terrestrial
habitat maps do not yet exist. Sidescan sonar data were collected by
the USGS in the area of the Channel Islands National Park and Marine
Sanctuary for this purpose. To estimate available white abalone
habitat we sum the perimeter of polygons drawn around areas of
exposed rock within the appropriate depth range, and assume the
abalone habitat is restricted to within one meter of the rock-sand
boundary. The estimates are conservative because the polygons do
not reproduce the natural complexity of the boundary and because only
areas in the sidescan data that showed clear sonar shadows were
selected as rocky bottom. South of San Miguel Island we identified
587 individual rocky areas with a total of 86,000 m2 of white abalone
habitat. To the east on the mainland in the Big Sycamore State fish
reserve an identical analysis revealed no suitable white abalone habitat.
This is likely due to the greater amount of sediment in the coastal
shelf compared to the sediment poor shelf of San Miguel Island.
The use of GIS as a tool for characterizing and analyzing marine protected areas can be a fairly straightforward application of mapping technology, similar to methods used for terrestrial protected areas. Yet marine protected areas are unique because the 'area' of interest is in fact a 'volume' of interest, a three-dimensional liquid space between the sea floor and the surface of the water. This is hardly a revelation. So why are marine protected areas not widely analyzed in GIS as three-dimensional spaces, comparable to terrestrial applications in 3D geologic mapping?
The root of misunderstanding about 3D GIS probably began when the phrase "That's cool" was first uttered. Labeling maps as being "cool" is the kiss of death in GIS. What it really means is, "That it is probably interesting to the rabble but it has little substantive or analytical value to hard core GIS analysts." It can also mean, "That's nice you can do that with your software, but so what?"
This paper will explore the idea that 3D GIS is perfectly suited for advanced analysis of marine protected areas, using examples from the Pribilof Islands, Alaska, as well as other marine protected areas. Marine geographers need not be envious of their terrestrial counterparts anymore. What marine environments lack in terms of the availability of spatial data can be made up for in 3D
visualization.
This paper examines the convergence of two relatively new and increasingly popul ar trends in state-led environmental resource management: marine protected areas (MPAs) and Geographic Information Science (GIS). MPAs have been found to be ef fective in the management and conservation of fisheries in particular, and marin e habitats in general. Likewise, GIS has been successfully used to support vari ous environmental decision-making and management processes. On the contrary, I argue that the combination of state-mandated MPAs and GIS have fostered politica l struggles and organized resistance among stakeholders (including fishers, envi ronmentalists, and the state) unlike any previous marine resource regulations. T hese political struggles might ultimately render MPA management plans unsustaina ble due to the absence of key stakeholder participation and cooperation.
I examine these issues through a comparison of two recently established MPAs in Moorea, French Polynesia and the Channel Islands, California. While there has b een a recent explosion of natural science publications on various dimensions of MPAs, studies on the social dimensions of MPAs are sorely lacking. Unlike simpl istic, popular analyses of MPAs which describe the conflict in terms of "objecti ve" science vs. "obstinate" fishers, I argue that there are tremendously complex relationships among and between stakeholders and the marine areas in question, which shape and are shaped by the seascapes or the social and physical geograph ies in which the stakeholders live and work. This paper illustrates how politi cal struggles over MPAs are caught up in local issues of stakeholders livelihood s, identities, and environmental knowledge; contextualized within global process es of capitalist transformation. Keywords: marine protected areas, PPGIS, political ecology, California, French Polynesia
The Marine Protected Areas (MPA) GIS database was compiled in 1997 and used to produce maps for a book authored by California Marine Protected Areas. The personnel at the Remote Sensing Research Unit, University of California Santa Barbara Geography Department, performed the GIS work from data sources collected by Debra McArdle. Funding for the compilation effort came from the California Sea Grant Cooperative Extension Program and partially from NASA.
No Technical Report was produced, there was no independent accuracy assessment nor were there any follow-up revisions. A lack of funding and participant involvement precluded these activities. The database is however the only one of its kind and the creators believe it to be accurate given the data sources used. A 1:24,000 vector database of the coast of California compiled by the State Lands Commission was used as the base layer from which the terrestrial boundaries of the protected areas were estimated. Unfortunately the contiguous coastline at 1:24,000 scale, which included offshore rocks, is no longer available and no meta data can be found that describes its accuracy but comparison with other data of known accuracy shows that the coastline vectors are highly reliable.
The purpose of this presentation is to make apparent to GIS data users some of the facits of database compilation that may be transparent to managers and decision makers. Also, some of the findings, such as the area totals and conflicting boundary maps, will be presented and discussed in the context of database compilation. Of interest for this AAG special session on GIS in support of Marine Protected Areas will be the accuracy of this database, how it was compiled and discrepancies in the sources. Acreages and coastline boundary intersections may differ between sources for several reasons but those depicted in the database represent those most accurate possible.
Differences could be due to:
In this paper we describe the development and use of the Tijuana River Watershed TRW) GIS in support of the management of the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR). Key components of the project are database development, scientific studies, public outreach and education, and watershed management.
The TRW spans 1,750 square miles astride the California-Baja California border, with one-third of the watershed in the United States and two-thirds in Mexico. The northern section in the U.S. drains into Mexico and merges with a network of tributaries to form the Tijuana River just outside of the City of Tijuana, Mexico. The river flows through Tijuana into the U.S. and the Tijuana Estuary on its way to the Pacific Ocean. The estuary is one of the largest functioning wetlands remaining in Southern California and is protected as a National Wildlife Refuge, a National Estuarine Research Reserve, and a California State Park.
The TRW is diverse geographically with a wide range of physical and cultural environments. It lies in the most populous section of the U.S.-Mexico border region and contains about two million persons. The lower TRW is characterized by loosely consolidated marine sediments, steep canyon slopes, intermittent streams, and a Mediterranean climate regime. The international border's economic and social dynamics foster intense migration into the TRW from the interior of Mexico. The rapid population growth results in development stresses on the ecosystem, water supplies, and urban infrastructure. The impacts of urbanization lead to difficult management problems downstream in the TRNERR which are being addressed through the use of a binationally produced GIS
We developed software that integrates a commonly used GIS program (ESRIÕs ArcView) with a collection of oceanographic analysis routines. The Oceanographic Analyst Extension (OAE) builds on the capabilities of ESRIÕs Spatial Analyst (required) and 3-D Analyst (not required). OAE contains a parsing tool that will read several common output files from oceanographic instruments and then spatially database them. However, tabularized data from any instrument can be utilized. The program creates vertical slices of the resulting 3-dimensional data (Z profiles in X and Y space) along a user-selected axis, and then contours them using one of many interpolation methods; bathymetry can be queried as a bottom mask for the 2-D output. The program also conducts time profiling at single points. Both of these profiling functions produce publication-ready graphs that can be manipulated, explored, and referenced to other spatial parameters. The program also has cast-summarizing routines to produce summarized data values for each cast that can then interface with traditional 2-D GIS data sets. A version of the program that requires 3-D Analyst and allows the presentation of vector acoustic Doppler current data will also be available. Our extension has an extensive set of additional tools to aid in the input, preparation, analysis, and presentation of oceanographic data. This application can be loaded as an extension under multiple operating system platforms. We will demonstrate the use of these functions to analyze oceanographic data from a complex glacial fjord estuarine system in Glacier Bay, Alaska a recently created marine protected area.