Mote Marine Laboratory

Issues and Impacts

By: Dr. Ernest Estevez

America’s ambition for ocean and coastal resource conservation is to employ a strategy called ecosystem-based management. This precautionary principle calls for oceans and coastal areas to be managed based on understanding how ecosystems work rather than on single-mission objectives such as maximizing the extraction of this mineral or that fishery, or finding easy ways to discharge wastes.

Ecosystem-based management is an ambitious goal. It means that much more must be learned through research about how ecosystems work. It also means that policy-makers and decision-makers will have to speak first for the restoration and conservation of nature and then make the social and economic changes necessary for particular stakeholders to compromise for stewardship.

Learning more about Florida’s ocean and coastal ecosystems is the mission of Florida’s Oceans and Coastal Resources Council, created by the state legislature in 2005. Fifteen scientists and resource managers from across the state are charged with defining marine and estuarine research priorities for waters surrounding Florida.

The Council has ongoing charges to monitor past and ongoing research across the state, synthesize information describing the ecological condition of Florida’s ocean and estuary waters and prioritize research needs brought forward by agencies responsible for managing ocean and coastal resources. Agencies identified such needs in 2005 and 2006 and the Council recognized that most fell in three cornerstones, or legs, of ecosystem-based management: mapping, monitoring and modeling.

With 1,200 miles of coastline and 10 million acres of Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico waters falling within Florida’s domain, large gaps remain in our knowledge of what resources we own, and where they are. In many instances, all we really know about offshore waters is their depth. The recent discovery of Pulley Ridge, America’s deepest coral reef system in the continental U.S., off the Southwest Florida coast, illustrates how much is left to map of our marine world.

The success of the National Hurricane Center’s prediction of Hurricane Katrina’s path and destructive strength testifies to the importance of monitoring and modeling. A state like Florida needs to develop ocean monitoring and modeling abilities equal to the ocean’s importance in our economy and quality of life. The Oceans Council has given very high priority to establishing a coastal ocean observing system that will automatically sense, measure, and report continuous data on physical, chemical and biological conditions in marine and estuarine waters. Once operational, such an observing system will inform resource managers, governments and the public at large on red tides, oil spill trajectories, fishery conditions, maritime hazards and the coastal and oceanic impacts of human activities on land.

New knowledge is necessary but insufficient to protect state waters. Florida’s investment in ocean research must ramp up significantly to meet the demands for high-quality scientific information on the state’s underwater environments but, in the final analysis, science can only illuminate social issues, not solve them.

The rest is up to all of us working together.

— Dr. Ernest Estevez, a Tampa native, is director of Mote’s Center for Coastal Ecology and has served on Florida’s Oceans and Coastal Resources Council since its inception. He has conducted studies in the tidal reaches of more than three dozen Florida rivers, emphasizing the preservation and restoring natural flows of fresh water to estuaries.

Learn more about: Coastal Ecology

We're angling for your support. Do your part to help conserve Florida's oceans and coasts.