NOAA's Ecosystem Approach to Management

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM) is a holistic, evolutionary management strategy designed to improve the productivity of coastal and marine ecosystems. NOAA has developed a vision for an ecosystem approach to management, and detailed its mission and outcomes for sustainable use of the nation’s coastal and marine resources. This vision incorporates collaboration among NOAA, other federal, state, tribal, and local agencies, NGOs, academic and business communities. An ecosystem approach to management shifts current management practices from sectoral, short-term perspective s, with humans independent of ecosystems to ecosystem-based, long-term perspectives and humans integral to ecosystems. The management practices will be geographically specific, located in 10 recently delineated US regional ecosystems based on the Large Marine Ecosystem model. NOAA will work further to delineate sub-ecoregions, and address inland boundary issues based on coastal watersheds and diadromous fish habitat, as well as other boundary issues. NOAA has defined five EAM strategies: adaptive, incremental, geographically specifying management areas, accounts for ecosystem knowledge and uncertainties, and balances diverse societal objectives. In order to understand health and socioeconomic status and trends of these delineated ecosystems, the agency is developing a suite of of national level of ecosystem indicators. Over time, NOAA plans to expand the indicator suite to have a regional and sub-regional set for each ecosystem. NOAA’s future steps towards EAM include improving internal integration and coordination to produce better products and services, while collaborating with partners to begin the regional process of ecosystem-based management.