Grantee:  Julie Ekstrom (Stanford Univ.), Dr. Kincho Law (Stanford Univ.)

Contact:  Julie Ekstrom (jekstrom at sign stanford.edu)

Website: http://minoe.stanford.edu

Project Summary:

BACKGROUND
Management of the marine environment traditionally has been divided into individual sectors, such as transportation, mining, and fishing.  Combined with increased ocean uses and growing coastal populations, fragmented sector-based management is a source of today’s problems with ocean health, such as depleted fisheries, disappearing wetlands, and polluted beaches. Government and academia have clearly established the need for an integrated ecosystem-based approach to marine management to alleviate problems of fragmented management. However, in order to operationalize ecosystem-based management (EBM), the morass of law governing the ocean needs to be better understood so that place-specific problems can be prioritized and targeted in EBM planning. Two common problems that consistently appear ocean management are gaps and overlaps. The proposed EBM tool will help untangle fragmented laws for EBM by focusing on the problem of legal gaps.

GAPS ANALYSIS
Although our interests encompass both problems of fragmentation, this MEBMTIF project focuses on analysis of gaps. While there are several ways to define a gap in ocean management, our definition is founded in the idea that management systems should reflect (or match) the properties of the given ecosystem. Within the traditional sector-based approach, mismatches between institutions and the ecosystem are common. In trying to identify these mismatches objectively and quantitatively for any given ecosystem, we developed a gaps analysis to test specifically for whether critical relationships between ecosystem components are reflected in law. For this project, a legal gap in ocean management is when a critical linkage between two components of a system for a given place is not addressed in any law. Linkages can include interactions among species and/or habitats, or with biophysical conditions or human stressors. For example, salmon depend on estuaries for safe nursery and spawning habitat throughout the northern Pacific coast. Therefore, a linkage exists between this species and the estuary habitat. Ideally, this linkage should be reflected in the laws regulating the species, the habitat, and their interaction. If the law fails to take into account the linkage, the result is a gap.

To develop the gap analysis, we used a collection of state and federal laws representing the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem. A series of computational processes in Matlab, UCINET, and Excel were used to develop and manually run the existing prototype. We recognize that conceptual ecosystem models differ by location, societal and economic values, and scientific knowledge. Rather than constrain our gap analyses to the limited ecosystem models documented in literature, automating it will make it freely available to the public, especially those involved in EBM programs.

The MEBMTIF is supporting the automation of the gaps analysis prototype. The first version of this open-source software uses our existing collection of over 74,000 sections of law representing management within the northern California Current Large Marine Ecosystem. This dataset includes marine and coastal related statues and regulations from Washington, Oregon, California, as well as the federal U.S. laws. There will be two outputs of the analysis: 1. specific gaps (ecosystem linkages missing from law); and 2. two metrics for the degree of fit between an user-defined ecosystem and the laws of a geo-political jurisdiction. One metric evaluates the correlation between networks (ecosystem and laws) using the quadratic assignment procedure (Mantel Test), and the other measurement evaluates the ratio of gaps to ecosystem linkages.

INTENDED BENEFITS AND USERS
There are two primary benefits of this tool. First, and most immediate, is that it will provide tool that can be used by government agencies and other stakeholders involved in existing EBM programs within the California Current. Second, but perhaps most important, is that will provide a framework for other regions to do a similar analysis using their region’s laws (or other management-related documents).

Our project begins in 2008 and will produce the first automated version of the gaps tool by June 2009. We welcome potential user feedback because we intend to continue developing the tool to be most useful for EBM programs. We hope that this tool, with its capacity to identify and measure legal gaps in specific locations, can provide decision-makers with a tool to tackle the major obstacle of fragmentation through ecosystem-based management.