MarineMap: Web-Based Marine Spatial Planning

The MarineMap decision support tool has been designed for non-technical users involved in participatory and collaborative marine spatial planning (MSP). Users may draw prospective boundaries, view reports habitat and fisheries impact reports, share their work with other MarineMap users, and export their work to other popular applications (e.g., Google Earth, Excel). We have developed MarineMap with free and open source software with the expressed purpose of extending this intuitive and high effective application with other spatial planning processes around the world. We will demonstrate the major features of MarineMap and describe how it has been used by the California Marine Life Protection Act Initiative.

MarineMap has been used successfully as an integral part of the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI), a process to design a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in California state waters.  After one year of heavy usage, stakeholders of authored over five thousand prospective MPA designs and have submitted them for review by the California Fish and Game Commission. Stakeholders routinely report that MarineMap has been central to their efforts to use the best available science in their charge to design MPAs.

We are currently extending MarineMap to support the Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) Project, a nation-wide ocean zoning effort in England. Our open-source code facilitates the rapid transfer of MarineMap to new geographies for MPA design, or virtually any other MSP project, without the added cost and complications associated with licensing the use of proprietary software. Other uses for MarineMap besides MPA planning include alternative energy (i.e., wave and wind farm) siting and fisheries management. Indeed, MarineMap may be used for any place-based, multi-objective, collaborative or participatory design project, and need not be restricted for marine uses.