Sustainability and Ocean Management
Marine coral diversity (credit: Oceans Tipping Point Project)
At a time of major stress on the oceans, innovative researchers, policy entrepreneurs, and business managers need new, practical, and effective tools for implementing sustainability. Focused efforts are needed to prevent tipping points before they occur. A tipping point happens it indicates a critical juncture has been reached which rapidly leads to a new an irreversible ecological status. Collapsed fisheries, coastal dead zones, melting ice sheets, and dying reefs are the consequences of devastated marine environments.
Embedding knowledge and tools into marine management systems on the tipping point process can be tricky. A pioneering initiative to address this have been made by an interdisciplinary project led by the Center for Ocean Solutions with the launch of their Oceans Tipping Points web-portal. The online resource takes advantage of the latest marine science and ecological data gathered in databases at the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara. The access to this 'big data' is now being made available to anyone via this portal. Project leaders describe the new initiative.
The ecosystem-scale project is still in its infancy. Among the challenging management goals will be how best to effectively address marine sustainability, using the new data and research results, and communicate with those with vested interests in the oceans. The NCEAS initiative is very timely, very important, very much needs to be adapted.
WHB