Abstract

Wicked problems and fairy tale answers in marine spatial planning
Track: Ocean, Coastal, and Marine Resources
Authors: Barbara Bollard-Breen, Dan Breen

We describe how GIS can integrate physical, biological and socio-economic data for marine ecosystems with decision support models to inform community participation in marine spatial planning. GIS had a pivotal role in several regional projects using common spatial locations to combine data from many disciplines, formats and sources into comprehensive knowledge bases. These systems unite data from sources as diverse as remote sensing, species distributions, anecdotal surveys, legislation and administration. Viewing this information with scenario modeling tools, workshops and input from communities, stakeholders, and scientists is an effective way to implement broad scale marine ecosystem research and management. We illustrate how these systems can be applied to complex problems using examples from several pacific regions. We also review some of the mistakes most commonly made in the hope of avoiding them in the future.