Recognizing Ecosystem Based Management

Ice Breaker

Dr. Chris Feurt of the Wells NERR and the University of New England thanks everyone for being here today. She explains that this conference has been in the works for about a year and that the purpose of this workshop is to increase the use of ecosystem based management tools and application of these tools.

One of the tools that is really affective is stakeholder engagement. To demonstrate this concept Chris has designed a Key Pad Polling ice breaker.

To get an idea of who is here and what interests are being represented Chris asks: How would you best characterize your organizational affiliation?

The result of this poll indicates that there is quite a diverse group of attendants: 6% from Municipal/Regional Gov, 34% State Government, 17% National Marine Fisheries 11% Other Federal Government Agencies, 17% University Affiliations, 3% Consultants, 6% NGO, and 3% Canada.

The Chris asks: How many years have you worked in land use and coastal management?

The results are interesting, folks are either fairly new to the field or have been doing this work for 20 plus years.

The polling results from the final question reveal that there is "almost a perfect bell curve" of levels of personal knowledge regarding coastal and land use management.

Introduction

Chris explains that they named this workshop the Practice and Potential of the Ecosystem-based Management because this Workshop is not about theory, it is about application. It is about being in the trenches. The Workshop is also designed to provide people with tangible examples of ecosystem based management. Thus, each of the presentations tell the story of ecosystem based management as it is being applied in Maine.

Chris proposes that ecosystem-based management has five elements:

1. A Collaboratively Developed Vision of Desired Future Outcomes
2. Indicators of Success and Mechanisms of for Tracking Progress
3. Interdisciplinary Science as a Measure of Ecosystem Sustainability
4. Identification and Engagement of Stakeholders
5. Place- the Scale of the Project as a Workable Geographic Boundary

Although the speakers are unaware of the five elements today's presentations are designed to give life to each of these elements. Chris asks to to think about these elements as each of the presenters speaks, think about who many of the elements are covered by each the approaches. Also, she wants us to think about projects we are involved in or would like to be involved in that incorporate one or more of these principles. We will revisit this at the end

On a lighter note

You know you are an ecosystem manager if you . . .

• had a meeting with someone outside you organization
• wrote a grant where 50% of the grant was dedicated to stakeholder engagement or social science
• spend more time talking then emailing
• you have had a breakfast meeting with someone outside of your agency/workplace in the past month
• everything is connect