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.
The Statewide Ocean Resource Inventory (SORI) contributes to a
project funded by the Florida Coastal Management Program. This
project identifies, collects, and packages pertinent coastal and
ocean information for use with a user-friendly desktop
information system accessible by federal, state, and local
decision makers. In order accomplish our goal of providing
targeted and packaged Geographic Information System (GIS) data to
marine resource managers in the state of Florida, we extended an
invitation to the coastal and ocean management communities to
enter into a partnership with the Coastal And Marine Resource
Assessment section (CAMRA) within the Florida Marine Research
Institute. The partnership spanned approximately one and a half
years through various forums; workshops for research and design
on the application prototype (an interim product), a prototype
evaluation, data assessment, identifying management issues and
regulatory information prioritization.
The multi-agency cooperation formed a consortium of GIS and
natural resource managers, planners, policy makers, and
scientists to transition to the management of Florida's waters
with the best-available information. The many steps required in
our partnership approach included the following:
Many of Florida's marine resource managers recognize that a great
portion of the state's culture and economy are rooted in its
valuable coastal and ocean assets. The peninsula of Florida is
bordered by approximately eight thousand, one hundred miles of
shoreline. Even the inland portions of the state are considered
to be influenced by the marine environment due to the inherent
connectivity of Florida's aquatic ecosystems. Florida lies
between two distinct waterbodies, the Gulf of Mexico and the
Atlantic Ocean. Each of these marine environments have been
designated as Large Marine Ecosystems by the United Nations
Environmental Programme. Florida also boasts of internationally
significant ecosystems such as the Everglades, Florida Bay and
the Florida Keys as well as world renown beaches and fishing
grounds. Likewise, there are ten major ports, a large tourist
industry, development pressures and military activities that
Florida houses within these ecosystems. The diversity of
resources coupled with the wide array of human pressures makes
coastal zone management in Florida a challenging endeavor.
The partners were employed as our expert panel to insure that the
GIS efforts aligned with the needs of Florida's marine management
community. Throughout the various workshops, the partners
developed a list of issues that are considered priority in
managing Florida's waters. While Florida is faced with a
multitude of marine management issues, the following is a list of
the focus issues in the Statewide Ocean Resource Inventory
project:
Nested within each of the management issues are more targeted
issues. Within Disaster Response, the information supports
response to an oil spill, a hurricane, or a marine mortality
event. After defining the priority issues, we determined what
information would be most useful in addressing management
questions within a particular issue to support ocean policy.
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 SORI
project addresses this need by developing a data assessment and
information base to facilitate a state ocean policy and provide
state, regional, and local managers with much-needed local marine
resource information.
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.
The Florida Marine Research Institute has a statewide data
repository of digital marine resource information. The Marine
Resource Geographic Information System (MRGIS) is a collection of
approximately 300 GIS resource data layers. It houses the
resource information from collective efforts of state agencies in
Florida.
Through an exercise of matching datasets with issues, we siphoned
the MRGIS datasets into the issue categories. The results were a
compilation of 15-25 targeted datasets per issue. The
compilation was comprised to minimize the time it takes for a
manager to access and browse the necessary information by
optimizing the available information. The infusion of GIS with a
management issue facilitates immediate and targeted information
access. The issue-focused information provides managers access
to digital datasets that were not previously available in one
location.
Advancing technologies provide the means to execute the needs of
marine resource managers in Florida. While 75% of the Floridian
population resides on or near the coast, coastal managers are
faced with constant change in the marine environment. The
changing environment results in a continual shift in focus for
the state's resource managers. Not only are resource managers
constantly adapting to the influx of population, but they must
account for population pressures on the coast in two different
climates. Florida's coastline migrates through a temperate
climate in Northern Florida to a sub-tropical climate in South
Florida. Two distinct climates present varying circumstances
surrounding each management issue.
Florida's marine resource managers are concerned with two issues
when it comes to geographic information; speedy access to all
relevant information and availability of the most current
information. Marine resource managers are sometimes required to
act within a limited time frame. Faced with only a small amount
of time to make decisions, quick access to the best-available
information is vital. At the onset of an event requiring
management decisions, valuable time is lost in decisions on what
information is most pertinent, the search for the information,
translation into a useful format, in addition to familiarizing
staff with new application software to view and analyze the
geographic information. The continual evolution of information
needs and management issues, paves the path towards quick,
distributed access mechanisms inside the World Wide Web (WWW).
The WWW is revolutionizing how government agencies communicate,
access, and utilize information. Until recently the only
geographic information available on the Web were static maps that
were limited in providing only a snapshot of information with no
means for analysis. Recent breakthroughs in Web-based,
interactive mapping are changing the way geographical information
is accessed and used.
Prior to the new technology, the SORI application was available
only through a customized ArcView interface drawing the static
information from a CD-ROM. The application required users to
have ArcView software version 2.1, CD-ROM readers, 32MB RAM for
optimal viewing, and 400 MB of free disk space. The demand for
the geographic information exceeded the need for timely access to
dynamic information. Due to the technological limitations, users
were forced to trade speed and continuous updates to the
information for fingertip access.
Interactive Web-mapping removes the sacrifices that traditionally
surrounds a "user-friendly, desktop information system".
Resource managers can easily browse current information by theme
or management issue through the SORI Web page
(www.fmri.usf.edu/sori)
.
It is the easiest and most cost effective way for publishing the most
up-to-date geographic information to a broad audience.
To support marine resource protection activities, CAMRA is
developing a suite of desktop information tools to address
management challenges ranging from oil spill response to South
Florida ecosystem restoration to statewide coastal/ocean resource
inventorying and management. These tools have been created
within the Coastal Ocean Management Planning and Assessment
System (COMPAS) framework, an initiative evolving out of NOAA's
Strategic Assessment Division (SEA). The COMPAS framework
combines software development endeavors and data packaging
efforts to support policy analysis within the marine resource
management and emergency response communities.
CAMRA utilizes the COMPAS framework as an evolving process for
desktop information tool development to ensure useful
applications are produced and the best available information is
synthesized and provided to Florida's marine resource managers.
Future COMPAS efforts include partnering with NOAA's SEA Division
and Coastal Services Center as well as, state agencies from
around the Southeastern United States to develop the South
Atlantic Ocean GIS for managing offshore marine resources at a
regional scale. The flexibility of this process lends itself to
management efforts at several scales, in many locations, for a
variety of management issues.
The paper is based on work funded by the Florida Coastal
Management Program. Geographic Planning Collaborative, Inc.
provided technical expertise on the Internet mapping.
Courtney Westlake is an Assistant Research Scientist in the
Coastal and Marine Resource Assessment (CAMRA) of the Florida
Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her
technical expertise is in GIS, cartography, spatial analysis, and
ArcView and Internet application development.
Robert Hudson is a GIS Analyst in the Coastal and Marine Resource
Assessment (CAMRA) of the Florida Marine Research Institute in
St. Petersburg, Florida. His focus is on Florida marine resource
policy analysis, GIS, and ArcView application development.
Christopher Friel is the Research Administrator of the Coastal
and Marine Resource Assessment Section (CAMRA) of the Florida
Marine Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The authors thank Chris Johnson, Jim Poehlman, Henry Norris,
Jennifer Bexley and Douglas Wilder for their invaluable
contributions to the project.
Florida Marine Research InstituteIntroduction
Multi-Agency Partnerships
Defining Management Issues
Policy Support
100 Eighth Avenue SE
St. Petersburg, Florida 33701
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