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Launching of Center for Marine Assessment and Planning


Benjamin S. Halpern, a Research Biologist at the Marine Science Institute, has just announced the launch of the Center for Marine Assessment and Planning (CMAP) here at UCSB: CMAP “unites all activities at UCSB related to science, policy, management, use and conservation. These activities share a goal of pursuing effective and efficient ways to sustainably use and protect our ocean ecosystems. CMAP’s overarching mission is to 1) facilitate interdisciplinary work that bridges undergraduate to faculty-level research, 2) engage resource users and management practitioners in the pursuit of science-based solutions, and 3) address local, national, and international issues.”

CMAP projects fall within three broad themes, each of which includes interconnected and complementary research:

  1. Planning for an uncertain future. Research foci: a) Emerging ocean uses and b) Decision making under uncertainty
  2. Science of complex oceans. Research foci: a) Marine ecosystem science, b) Coupled land-ocean ecosystems, and c) Connectivity in the coastal ocean
  3. Spatial planning & management. Research foci: a) Marine ecosystem science, b) Coupled land-ocean ecosystems, and c) Connectivity in the coastal ocean

Dr. Halpern is the Director of CMAP, and affiliated researchers include Frank Davis and John Melack (Affiliated Geography Faculty) and Libe Washburn (Geography); Dave Siegel and Mike Goodchild (Geography) serve on the CMAP Advisory Board. Specific research projects undertaken by CMAP currently include:

  • The Program on Governance for Sustainable Development which brings together scholars and practitioners to explore the role of institutions in addressing the challenges of sustainable development. It seeks to understand the role of governance in world affairs, with a focus on the institutions that manage the complex interdependencies within our societies and economies, and between these human systems and natural systems.
  • MarineMap which is a web-based decision support tool for open and participatory spatial planning in the marine environment. MarineMap offers a simple, flexible and powerful means of gathering expertise from resource managers, scientists, stakeholders and public in a process of collaborative decision making.
  • Cumulative Impact Assessment: Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM), Marine Spatial Planning (MSP), and other comprehensive planning approaches which emphasize the need to assess and account for the cumulative impact of human activities on ecosystems. A collection of related projects have developed and implemented the methodology for calculating and mapping the cumulative impact of all human activities on marine ecosystems. Regional case studies to date include the California Current, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Massachusetts, the Mediterranean, and the Great Lakes.
  • The Ocean Health Index. We know the ocean’s health is under threat…but how bad is it? And how will we know if our actions to help the ocean are working? Until now, there has been no consensus on what determines ocean health and no common metric to measure it. The Ocean Health Index focuses on goals articulated in four decades of ocean treaties and high level national and intergovernmental reports. Using indicators that measure the intensity of the most urgent ocean stressors, including climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, habitat degradation, invasive species, loss of biodiversity, pollution and eutrophication, the Ocean Health Index will measure the status and trends of ocean health and its components. The index will also assess trends in remedial actions taken to conserve marine habitats. Finally, the index will relate trends in ocean health to benefits provided to people and human well-being.
  • The Santa Barbara Coastal LTER: The Santa Barbara Coastal Long Term Ecological Research Project (SBC) is part of the National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network. The LTER Program was established by the NSF in 1980 to support research on long-term ecological phenomena. SBC became the 24th site in the LTER network in April of 2000.
  • The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) Mitigation Monitoring Program is based at the Marine Science Institute, University of California Santa Barbara. Long-term monitoring and evaluation of the SONGS mitigation projects is a condition of the coastal development permit issued by the California Coastal Commission (CCC) for the operation of SONGS Units 2 and 3. The Permit requires Southern California Edison (SCE) as majority owner and operating agent of SONGS to design and build mitigation projects that adequately compensate for the adverse effects of the power plant’s once-through seawater cooling system on coastal marine resources. UCSB scientists working under the direction of the Executive Director of the CCC are responsible for designing and implementing monitoring programs aimed at determining the effectiveness of these mitigation projects. Funding for the SONGS Mitigation Monitoring Program is provided by SCE as a requirement of their coastal development permit for operating SONGS.
  • Ecological & Evolutionary Parasitology at UCSB: Our lab’s mission statement is to analyze and reveal the role of infectious processes in ecosystem dynamics. We apply these principles to applications including the assessment of ecological functioning of estuarine ecosystems in the context of environmental mitigation and restoration projects, biological control of introduced marine pests, reducing losses to fisheries caused by parasitic diseases, and biological control of human schistosomiasis.
  • The Moorea Coral Reef Long-Term Ecological Research site (MCR LTER) is the complex of coral reefs and lagoons that surround the island of Moorea, French Polynesia. Coral reefs represent one of the most diverse ecosystems on earth. Unfortunately, the world’s coral reefs are disappearing at an alarming rate. Current estimates indicate that almost 20% of the world’s coral reefs have been lost and another 35% are in serious danger of being lost by 2050 due to the effects of coastal development, over-fishing and multiple factors associated with global climate change (GCRMN 2008). The primary goal of the Moorea Coral Reef Long-term Ecological Research site is to explore the effects of these external drivers on the fate of coral reefs. The MCR LTER was established in 2004 by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and is a partnership between the University of California Santa Barbara and California State University, Northridge. MCR researchers include marine scientists from the UC Santa Barbara, CSU Northridge, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, CSU San Marcos, Duke University and the University of Hawaii. Field operations are conducted from the UC Berkeley Richard B. Gump South Pacific Research Station on the island of Moorea, French Polynesia.
  • The Sustainable Fisheries Group (SFG) at UCSB which provides leadership to develop some of the diverse elements required to drive fisheries reform and sustainable ocean use more generally. SFG’s work seeks to utilize market approaches to increase the ecological and economic performance of fisheries and the sustainability of coastal communities. We bring the necessary scientific expertise and intellectual capital to key partnerships with leading conservation organizations, local NGOs, and diverse stakeholder groups in order to find solutions to critical environmental problems affecting the oceans and to affect management reform and policy change. Our interdisciplinary research combines the skills of quantitative ecologists and economists to address a wide range of environmental problems – from theoretical to applied – including those related to market-based fisheries reform and marine protected areas
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Ben Halpern is Director of CMAP and a Research Biologist at the Marine Science Institute. He also serves as Project Coordinator for a large project on Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) of coastal marine systems, based at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and is a lead scientist for the Ocean Health Index project. Much of his research addresses issues related to Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning (CMSP), including cumulative impact and ecosystem service tradeoff assessments

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Frank Davis teaches landscape ecology and conservation planning, and heads the Biogeography Lab at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. His research focuses on the landscape ecology of California plant communities; the design of protected-area networks; rangeland and farmland conservation; and the biological implications of regional climate change

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Michael F. Goodchild is Professor of Geography at UCSB and Director of UCSB’s Center for Spatial Studies. His current research interests center on geographic information science, spatial analysis, and uncertainty in geographic data.

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John Melack’s research has emphasized ecological processes in aquatic systems, and hydrological and biogeochemical aspects of catchments. Since 2001 he has been examining export of nutrients and sediments into the Santa Barbara Channel as a function of land use and variations in rainfall and runoff. He served as a co-investigator on a project designed to improve fisheries management in coastal California waters

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Dave Siegel’s research focuses on the coupling of physical, biological, optical, and biogeochemical processes on micro to ocean basin scales. Specifically, ocean color remote sensing and optical oceanography, mesoscale eddy & coastal processes, numerical modeling, Lagrangian approaches to understanding mixing and its implications, quantification of subgrid scale processes, human-natural system coupling, role of radiative exchanges in air-sea interactions, and data information systems

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Libe Washburn is an oceanographer and professor working at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in the Department of Geography. He is also affiliated with the Marine Science Institute (MSI) and is currently chair of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Marine Science. His main research interests focus on interdisciplinary links between ocean circulation processes and marine communities in a variety of ocean environments. Washburn’s research is based on primarily observations and he employs a variety of approaches in his work including high frequency (HF) radar for mapping surface currents

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