Oregon Moves to Zone Ocean
Attempts to coordinate competing off-shore uses
January 18, 2012
The ocean mapping and zoning process off the Oregon coast will attempt to balance a diversity of needs and interests including those of fishermen and ocean energy technologies.
U.S. communities routinely use zoning laws to control where businesses may operate in a neighborhood. Now there's a move to zone the ocean. A number of coastal states and the federal government have fledgling plans to coordinate competing uses for their off-shore waters.
The prospect of new wind-turbine farms going up within sight of popular beaches prompted interest in such plans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. On the U.S. West Coast, the impetus has been wave and tidal energy development, but balancing competing uses for coastal waters has proved a difficult challenge.
Uncharted territory
At first glance, the Pacific Ocean looks wide open and mostly empty, but it's anything but that on a digital map the state of Oregon recently posted online. The interactive display includes some 150 layers of data about existing ocean uses and natural features.
Oregon Sea Grant fellow Todd Hallenbeck checks out prime fishing grounds on his laptop.
"There's a large area of the territorial sea that's important to fishing with the darker red colors representing some of the most important areas for each of the ports," he says, looking at the map, which lights up from Neah Bay, Washington south to the Oregon-California border. "We can turn on things like commercial shipping lanes...We can turn on some of the seabird layers that represent areas where there are seabird colonies."
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