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Barry Costa-Pierce, Ph.D., FAAAS, professor and chair of the Department of Marine Sciences and director of the Marine Science Center, co-authored an article that was recently published in Estuaries and Coasts, the journal of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation.

The article, “Managing bay and estuarine ecosystems for multiple services,” discusses a collaborative, transdisciplinary science effort, which involved a national team of 16 scientists from 12 institutions.  The effort was led by the University of California Santa Barbara.

The article addresses the fact that ecosystem managers are leaving behind a model of managing individual sectors, human activities, or ecosystem services in favor of an Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) approach, which attempts to balance the range of services provided by ecosystems.

Applying EBM is especially challenging for estuarine systems, which have been heavily altered in most regions and are often subject to intense management interventions. The article discusses a framework that provides resource managers a simple way to inform EBM decisions and that can also be used as a first step in more sophisticated approaches that model service delivery.

The work carried out by the team of scientists was funded by the National Sea Grant College Program.