The MARXAN Good Practices Handbook, written by more than two dozen volunteers in a year-long international collaboration, which offers guidance on better conservation planning from some of the most experienced people in the field was translated to Spanish and posted on various sites worldwide.

Working closely with DFO staff PacMARA designed and delivered a workshop and generated a CSAS report on the establishment of a science monitoring program for the Bowie Seamount Marine Protected Area.  This workshop was the first time that PacMARA used the innovative Challenge DialogueTM for creating effective communication and structuring the response from the workshop.
The [...]

Assisting in the development of strategies to develop and test methods for trade-offs analysis for ecosystem services (Marine InVEST).  PacMARA hosted a 2 day workshop to solicit input from a diverse set of stakeholders who were interested in the development of ecosystem service trade-off tools that could be used in BC.

Ed Gregr, Dave Nicolson and [...]

As Fisheries and Oceans Canada moved towards implementing Integrated Management in the North and Central Coasts of British Columbia, several options were evaluated for the placement of administrative boundaries. This report reviewed three proposed boundaries that span the Central and North Coasts, and made note of one other in the Central Coast (Figure 1). From these inputs two recommendations were developed:

1. The North – Central LOMA should extend from the Alaskan boarder southward to the vicinity of Seymour Narrows, but should not include Bute or Toba inlets. Brooks Peninsula should represent the southern boundary on the west coast Vancouver Island. The base of the shelf slope should be the western boundary and the coastal watersheds should represent the eastern boundary.

1. The deep sea offshore region should be treated as one contiguous LOMA. It would span all of BC’s deep offshore waters from Alaska to Washington State, and extend from the base of the shelf slope seaward to the 200 nautical mile limit of the Economic Exclusions Zone.

During the study it was recognized that any boundary in the marine realm, no matter how well placed, will contain human activities and ecosystem features and processes that are connected to areas outside of these artificial lines. Consequently, we suggest that regardless of where Fisheries and Oceans decides to delineate its North – Central Integrated Management area, it is imperative that there be administrative mechanisms that link to adjacent planning areas.

In this paper, an analysis of the literature around governance, collaboration, complexity, the role of science in society, and new thinking about resource management was undertaken to show that collaborations such as PacMARA might actually be better at asking and answering the questions needed to inform an ecosystem-based management approach.