Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s (DFO) Coastal Environmental Baseline Program supports the collection of ecological information on the current state of key coastal ecosystems across Canada. This initiative aims to acquire environmental baseline data (physical, chemical and biological) contributing to the characterization of important coastal areas and to support evidence-based assessments and management decisions for preserving marine ecosystems. From this page, you will find links to the data from projects undertaken from 2018-2022 at six coastal sites across Canada.

People receive numerous benefits from nature, such as water purification, coastal protection, and food production. These ecosystem services are an increasingly important consideration for coastal managers as they design management interventions to protect coastal habitat. This includes National Estuarine Research Reserve managers, who are working to better understand ecosystem services across the reserve system. However, without a standardized approach it has been difficult for coastal managers to consistently incorporate ecosystem services into programs or projects. In response to this need, researchers with Duke University’s National Ecosystem Services Partnership developed Ecosystem Services Conceptual Models (ESCMs) for estuarine habitats that diagram the way a management intervention cascades through an ecological system and provides benefits to people. The Duke team built on previous work that created an ecosystem services modeling approach for salt marsh. In partnership with the Rookery Bay and North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserves and their stakeholders, the team led a series of workshops to produce site-specific and generalized Ecosystem Services Conceptual Models for mangrove and oyster habitat restoration in the southeast United States. This catalyst project was funded by NOAA through the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to advance collaborative science. It did not produce any new data.

This record describes, and links to a working paper produced through the Crawford School of Economics and Government at The Australian National University in Canberra. We contribute to the understanding of marine reserves and the management of renewable resources with uncertainty. We show that the key benefit of reserves is that they increase resilience, or the speed it takes a population to return to a former state following a negative shock. Resilience can also increase resource rents even with optimal harvesting. We contradict the accepted wisdom that reserves have no value if harvesting is optimal, reserves and optimal output controls are equivalent, reserves have value only with overexploited populations and that reserves must be large to offer benefits to fishers.

This dataset summarizes 2015 Ocean Economy employment statistics for the U.S. coastal states by breaking down each ocean economic indicator per each ocean sector. The dataset also provides percent employment and percent GDP by sector. This percentage is a percent of the ocean sector compared to the total Ocean Economy for each state. This information was harvested from the Economics: National Ocean Watch (ENOW) time-series data on the ocean and Great Lakes economy, derived from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. ENOW data measures four economic indicators: Establishments, Employment, Wages, and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for six economic sectors that are dependent on the oceans and Great Lakes, including: Marine Construction, Living Resources, Offshore Mineral Extraction, Ship and Boat Building, Tourism and Recreation, and Marine Transportation.

Environmental Impact Statement: Marine aggregate proposal : marine ecological investigations

The Ecosystem Status Report series reports on overviews of the status of ecosystems, oceanographic conditions, biological communities, and other integrative evaluations of status of areas, from local to very large spatial scales. Prior to 2003, the standard oceanographic conditions reports were published in the Stock Status Report series.

A series of expenditure surveys have been done both regionally and nationally. This data pertains to the West coast states . Expenditures on trips by mode (for-hire, private boat, and shore) were collected for both residents and non-residents of each state, and annual expenditures on durable goods were collected by resident status. Expenditures were collected both as an add-on to the intercept, and a followup phone survey with those who completed the intercept and a separate random sample of households.

A compilation of ocean water quality (temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen) data at ¼ degree spatial resolution for the entire United States Exclusive Economic Zone. The dataset is derived from the ESRI Ecological Marine Unit (EMU) dataset, which was assembled from non-supervised statistical clustering of over 52 million points from NOAA’s World Ocean Atlas (2013) WoA database, an authoritative 57 year archive of global water column data. This derived dataset is divided into three separate point shapefiles, each representing either temperature (degrees Celsius), salinity (practical salinity units), or dissolved oxygen (mg/L). Values represent a climatological average. Each shapefile is formatted such that a single point location (i.e., unique associated latitude and longitude) contains a unique column entry for a given depth interval. Depth intervals are variable from 5 m near the surface to 100 m in the deeper regions (> 2000 m) for a total of 102 depth levels. All disclaimers provided by the original dataset authors apply to this derived dataset. For detail on these disclaimers, please refer to the following reference: Sayre, R., J. Dangermond, D. Wright, S. Breyer, K. Butler, K. Van Graafeiland, M.J. Costello, P. Harris, K. Goodin, M. Kavanaugh, N. Cressie, J. Guinotte, Z. Basher, P. Halpin, M. Monaco, P. Aniello, C. Frye, D. Stephens, P. Valentine, J. Smith, R. Smith, D.P. VanSistine, J. Cress, H. Warner, C. Brown, J. Steffenson, D. Cribbs, B. Van Esch, D. Hopkins, G. Noll, S. Kopp, and C. Convis. 2017. A New Map of Global Ecological Marine Units – An Environmental Stratification Approach. Washington, DC: American Association of Geographers. 36 pages.