The Oregon Coastal Atlas and MarineMap: Supporting Marine Conservation by Enhancing Stakeholder Participation and Involvement in Decision Making Processes

During the past year two public processes have been conducted that relate to Marine Spatial Planning and have a bearing on marine conservation: marine reserves, and the Amendment of Oregon’s Territorial Sea plan for marine renewable energy.  To support the processes many projects were carried out and geospatial products were generated.  In order to include them in the planning processes, the data sets were incorporated into the Oregon Coastal Atlas for long term storage and public data access, as well as built into Oregon MarineMap for data presentation, visualization, and the generation of simple geospatial reports.  Both processes required the interested stakeholders to be familiar with the knowledge and information being used to make decisions, and therefore heavily relied on the use of the Atlas and Oregon MarineMap.  The processes were facilitated by a website built to serve as the coordinating mechanism, http://www.OregonOcean.info, which helped to guide interested parties in understanding the processes, and the decisions that were being made.