Nearshore Marine Conservation Planning in the Pacific Northwest: Exploring the Utility of a Siting Algorithm for Representing Marine Biodiversity

Terrestrial conservation planning is well developed. In comparison, there are only a handful of published marine conservation plans and few of them are quantitative. The Nature Conservancy’s strategic planning approach, called “Conservation by Design,” employs an ecoregional planning methodology to construct conservation portfolios, or high-priority conservation areas. This chapter reports on the development of a regional nearshore marine analysis in the inland seas of Puget Sound, Washington, in the U.S., and the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, in Canada. The purpose of marine planning within the Willamette Valley-Puget Trough-Georgia Basin ecoregion was to identify a set of conservation areas that capture the full array of representative shoreline ecosystems and a subset of the existing nearshore biodiversity. This chapter outlines the basic steps of the ecoregional planning process, including the identification of conservation targets, assigning conservation goals, assessing population viability and ecological integrity, and selecting conservation areas. A marine planning team identified 37 shoreline ecosystems, one for rocky reef habitat, and 72 marine species as conservation targets. In order to achieve our conservation goals in the most efficient manner possible, we concluded that at least 30% of the total shoreline (excluding humanmade shore units) in the ecoregion warrants an evaluation of ecosystem integrity in order to place these sites in some form of protected status or conservation management. Four terms were adopted to describe and examine representation: overrepresentation (p > 1.3), adequately captured (p = > 1.03 and < 1.3), efficiency of representation (p = 1.0 +/.03), Zach Ferdaña Global Marine Initiative, The Nature Conservancy, 217 Pine Street Suite 1100 Seattle WA 98101 [email protected] Nearshore Marine Conservation Planning 153 and missing values (p = < .97). SITES, a reserve site selection algorithm, was used to examine site selection. Marine analyses were developed both in combination with terrestrial information and as a separate, yet parallel, process. The first approach used a seamless 750-hectare hexagon assessment unit across both environments. Although integrative in nature, the seamless unit tended to overrepresent shoreline targets (57%), thereby exceeding set conservation goals. However this analysis met most goals, with the missing values category containing only 4% of targets. The second approach used a linear shoreline and nearshore hexagon unit. A 4tiered nearshore analytical framework was designed to analyze information according to our confidence in the spatial data, and systematically incorporate expert input. It was found that overrepresentation was not as much of a factor as when using the seamless hexagon approach, with only 18% of targets considered over-represented. The missing values category contained 31%, thereby not performing as efficiently as the seamless hexagon in meeting conservation goals. Where the uniformity of the seamless hexagon provided the means to include information across environments in the land/sea interface, the nearshore and shoreline units tended to be more spatially explicit and follow ecological boundaries. In total, there were 186 shoreline/nearshore sites comprising 2,910 km of shoreline in the final conservation portfolio.