The Decision Guide, produced by the Center for Ocean Solutions (COS) and PacMARA, is intended to assist practitioners in selecting appropriate decision support tools (DSTs) that can help them conduct marine spatial planning in their own jurisdictions.

PacMARA and UBC have received a SSHRC grant to hold a workshop on Marine EBM Implementation on 9-10 May 2011 at the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, BC! This workshop will take a step past the Sidney Consensus towards creating a strategy roadmap to operationalize EBM in BC.

PacMARA convened an enthusiastic group of people from various disciples and backgrounds to develop a marine EBM principles, a logic model, and list of immediate actions that need to be taken to implement ecosystem-based management in Canada’s Pacific Ocean.

Version 2 of the Marxan Good Practices Handbook has just been released in July 2010!

The anticipated audience for this workshop report is familiar with the use of Marxan and conservation planning theory, and wishes to explore good practices around employing robust Marxan analysis or incorporating human use and socio-economic data in a Marxan analysis. Those interested in proposed ways to take the uncertainties related to climate change into account in Marxan analysis may also find value in this report.

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.
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The objective of this report is to help inform the EBM community of practice about information and data gaps existing in the EBM framework in BC marine waters and plan to fill the gaps.

Bowie Seamount is located 180 kilometres west of Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) in the northeast Pacific, off the coast of British Columbia. Also known by the Haida as Sgaan Kinghlas, which means “Supernatural Being Looking Outward,” Bowie Seamount is the shallowest seamount known in Canada’s Pacific waters. It rises from a depth of approximately 3,000 metres to within 24 metres of the sea surface. The Marine Protected Area in the vicinity of Bowie Seamount will give protection to a complex of three offshore seamounts – Bowie, Hodgkins and Davidson seamounts.

The goal of the Data Gaps Inventory is to identify what data currently exist in BC and where they can be found, as well as where the knowledge gaps lie. The emphasis is on geo-referenced datasets such as GIS, or those that could easily be imported into a GIS.

Translation of the Marxan User’s Manual to Spanish: is available here for download: Manual_Espanol.