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Track: Oceanography, Coastal Zone, Marine Resources
Courtney Westlake
Florida Marine Research Institute
100 Eight Ave SE
St. Petersburg, FL 33701
Telephone: 813-896-8626
Fax: 813-823-0166
E-mail: crash@anchovyfmri.usf.edu
Robert Hudson, Chris Friel
Protecting Florida's Oceans
Defining Issue: Environmental protection and conservation on the one hand, and the increasing pressure of human development activity on the other, lead inevitably to conflict between many different and often opposing uses of the coastal zone. In 1989 a report entitled Florida's Ocean Future: Towards a State Ocean Policy, produced by the Governor's Office of Planning and Budgeting, identified the need for a comprehensive ocean policy addressing the wise management of the State's offshore lands, coastal zone, and marine resources. However, a comprehensive knowledge of the resources and uses of Florida's coastal and marine environments is required before a comprehensive ocean policy can be developed. Data availability and data management problems have deterred an approach to managing Florida's coastal and ocean waters in a holistic and self-sustaining way. Unfortunately, needed information is seldom readily available and rarely in the possession of decision makers. Much information is in the possession of
individuals; however, it is often scattered between different federal, state, and municipal government departments, research institutes, and universities in various formats. GIS Solution: Florida's ocean policy should be based on the best information available and where data gaps exist; a systematic approach to filling these information voids should be implemented. The Statewide Ocean Resource Inventory project addresses this need by developing a data assessment, information base, and distribution mechanism that can be used to facilitate a State ocean policy and provide State, regional, and local managers with much needed local and marine resource information. The Florida Marine Research Institute is actively working to identify, collect, and package pertinent coastal and ocean information for use with a user-friendly desktop information system accessible to federal, State, and local decision makers. The ArcView desktop interface will digitally ink the Florida Statutes and Federal Regulations to GIS data
layers that address priority coastal/ocean issues in the State of Florida while also providing unique management tools to assess the State's natural resources issue by issue. Software: The application's primary development platform is ArcView with support from Netscape as a browse tool for the regulatory information and metadata.
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