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The MarineMap Consortium is a group of scientists and geospatial technologists at theUniversity of California Santa Barbara (UCSB),The Nature Conservancy (TNC) andEcotrust.
In 2007, the MarineMap Consortium formed to develop geospatial technologies at facilitatingmarine protected area (MPA) planning in California. The CaliforniaMarine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI) contracted the MarineMap consortium to develop a web-based decision support system geared toward helping non-technical users (i.e., stakeholders) design MPAs. Consequently, the consortium developed their flagship application, called MarineMap.
The MarineMap Consortium is now working to extend the MarineMapdecision support tool to be used by collaborative, participatory and science-basedmarine planning efforts around the world.
The MarineMap decision support tool is a web-based program for designing marine protected areas (MPAs). In particular, users can (1) view and query a large number of geospatial data layers, (2) draw prospective MPA boundaries, (3) analyze the contents of prospective MPAs, (4) estimate economic impacts of prospective MPAs, (5) assemble MPAs into collections (called "arrays"), (6) share MPAs and arrays with other MarineMap users, (7) assign allowed uses within prospective MPAs, and (9) export MPA shapes to KML and reports to CSV files.
In 2010, the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution awarded the Innovation in Technology and Environmental Conflict Resolution to the MarineMap Consortium.[1]
