Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

From transportation to resource management and health, geospatial data and technologies are now used to support decisions in most sectors of our society. The increasing volume, complexity, and diversity of data creates however a need for new methods that can help identify, summarize, and visualize information relevant to decision-makers, something that is the focus of many research projects in geomatics, computer sciences, geography, and other disciplines. In the marine environment, geospatial technologies became a key tool supporting ocean planning (e.g. Marine Spatial Planning) and more specifically to help design and monitor marine protected areas. From simple uses of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map different variables, to more complex methods and systems that help analyzing data and supporting decisions, geospatial data and systems play an increasing role in marine conservation planning. While a range of approaches and tools already support conservation planning efforts, the complexity of those decisions is rarely captured and still calls for new methods. In Canada, planning of new marine protected areas (MPAs) is ongoing in our three oceans. Canada is committed to increasing its MPAs from less than 1% of its territorial waters to at least 10% in less than 5 years, a trend that is expected to continue after. Such process requires the integration of large and diverse biological and socio-economic datasets and the involvement of many stakeholders. Exploring trade-offs between the need for diverse human activities (e.g. fishing, oil and gas exploration, shipping, tourism) and the need to protect fragile and valuable ecosystems is at the core of those processes that are often aiming to reach consensus with several different stakeholders. However, existing methods tend to only offer very simple ways to capture those trade-offs, and more research is required to design and help provide methods and tools that would allow decision-makers and stakeholders to better explore alternative conservation scenarios, their respective strengths and weaknesses, uncertainties, etc. The proposed research aims to explore how geospatial approaches used for supporting decisions in other fields can contribute to the field of marine conservation planning. Specific research objectives are to: 1. Develop methods that can support the selection and use of datasets in conservation planning processes. 2. Design and test approaches (based on methods from the field of decision-theory) that can help capture and communicate complex trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and the socio-economic use of the oceans in the form of simple indicators. 3. Explore how methods from the field of geovisual analytics and GIS can be used to help monitor the global effectiveness of MPA networks.