Marine Protected Areas Get a Boost from New UCSB Web-Based Program

This is what can happen when marine life and geospatial scientists collide: You get a smart, easy-to-use Web-based program that one day soon might help protect the world's fragile marine ecosystems.

William McClintock, a project scientist at UC Santa Barbara, and other researchers from UCSB's Marine Science Institute, have created MarineMap, an internet mapping and decision-support system for designing marine protected areas (MPAs). McClintock and his team developed the program in cooperation with the Nature Conservancy, Ecotrust, and Farallon Geographics. McClintock is director of the MarineMap Consortium.

For now, stakeholders in the new system will have to be content with using it to study the California coast. But McClintock and his team hope that soon this powerful tool, which allows users to draw lines on maps to sort out potential MPAs, will help scientists provide guidance to policymakers who will map protected areas for marine life around the world.

Read the rest of this article at msi.ucsb.edu