Management of the marine environment traditionally has been divided into individual sectors, such as transportation, mining, and fishing. Combined with increased ocean uses and growing coastal populations, fragmented sector-based management is a source of today's problems with ocean health, such as depleted fisheries, disappearing wetlands, and polluted beaches.
Government and academia have clearly established the need for an integrated ecosystem-based approach to marine management to alleviate problems of fragmented management. However, in order to operationalize ecosystem-based management (EBM), the morass of law governing the ocean needs to be better understood so that place-specific problems can be prioritized and targeted in EBM planning. The first step to better understanding existing law and regulation is to have user-friendly access to them. MINOE is an ecosystem-based management (EBM) tool that is designed to help interested parties navigate through existing laws and regulations (and associated agencies) for EBM in the context of any ecosystem.
This project is supported by the Ecosystem-Based Management Tools Initiative Fund from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which is administered through Duke University.