Tools and Methods for Integrated Land-Sea Planning
Session Organizers: Sarah Carr, Daniel Dorfman, Ken Vance-Borland, and Patrick Crist

Description: About the Workshop Organizers: Human activities on land and in the ocean are changing coastal and marine ecosystems and threatening their ability to provide important ecosystem services such as biodiversity, healthy and abundant seafood, clean beaches, and protection from storms and flooding.  Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) is an innovative management approach to address these challenges.  It considers whole ecosystems, including humans and the environment, rather than managing one issue or resource in isolation.  Innovative tools and methods for implementing EBM are emerging in regional coastal-marine resource management and planning efforts across the globe.  The EBM Tools Network (www.ebmtools.org) is an international alliance of government, non-government, academic, and private partners to promote awareness and support the effective use of these tools and methods for EBM.  The Network recently formed a Working Group to further the development of tools and methods for Integrated Land-Sea Planning, as well as a Training Program to promote the awareness and effective use of EBM tools and methods.

About the Workshop: There are two main types of interactions across the land-sea interface: 1) changes in land use and land cover from anthropogenic activities (such as development and restoration activities) and natural disturbances (such as storms or fires) alter the levels of nutrients, sediments, and pollutants entering estuarine and marine ecosystems and the health of those ecosystems and 2) sea levels and hazards (such as storms and tsunamis) originating in marine environments impact coastal communities and ecosystems.  Understanding and quantifying the impacts that occur across the land-sea interface is complex because terrestrial and marine scientists and resource managers utilize different analysis and modeling techniques.  Tools and methods for conducting spatial analyses that cross the land-sea interface (i.e. incorporate both terrestrial and hydrological analysis and modeling techniques) are developing rapidly, however.  This training workshop will use a selection of current case studies (from a rural area of Texas; an urban area in Charleston, South Carolina; and paired work in coastal Oregon and North Queensland, Australia) to educate participants about tools and methods that can be employed to conduct this work.  The full-day workshop will also allow enough time for participants to describe their proposed or desired integrated land-sea planning work and discuss different ways to conduct this work with workshop organizers and each other.

Conservation practitioners will share their "know how" for integrating land-sea planning and improving the health of both terrestrial and marine ecosystems and the human communities that depend on them.  In addition, a "sister" 2-hr symposium "Integrated Land-Sea Planning: Concepts and Case Studies" has been proposed for the meeting.  The symposium and the workshop are very complimentary.  The symposium will give a large number of practitioners an overview of cutting-edge work that is occurring in integrated land-sea planning; whereas the workshop will give a small group of practitioners (~30) an opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of that work and discuss how the methods developed in that work might be applied to their own projects.