Todd Bryan, chad burt, grace goldberg, dan yocum, 2016.
History
Members of our lab have degrees in biology, marine science, environmental science and management, human-computer interaction, computer science and psychology. We have come to address the challenges of developing and implementing software for marine science, management and planning from different angles.
Will McClintock established the lab in 2004 and began gathering a team of developers and GIS analysts to support marine conservation planning. Since then, the lab has developed partnerships with government agencies, NGOs and scientists all over the world, focusing on comprehensive marine spatial planning, fisheries management and enforcement.
MarineMap
From 2005-2010, the McClintock lab led the development and implementation of MarineMap, an award-winning web-based application used by stakeholders to design marine protected areas in the California Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative (http://vimeo.com/15701001). This collaborative effort, funded by the Resources Legacy Fund (RLF) involved lead developers at UCSB, and subcontracted developers at Farallon Geographics, The Nature Conservancy and Ecotrust.
MarineMap was developed continuously and released 3 times during the course of the MLPA Initiative, responding to the evolving needs of stakeholders, planners and scientists. The success of MarineMap has been written about extensively but this quote articulates one of the primary reasons for our success:
From the beginning, the MarineMap technology team (which included members with software as well as marine science backgrounds) was given the freedom to build a tool suited for the MLPAI Initiative and provided with sufficient resources to meet their mandate to create a geospatial DST. During the process, the team was highly integrated (“embedded”) into the planning process. Interviewees viewed the technology professionals as approachable, neutral, and helpful. Stakeholders also commented on the team’s responsiveness; many users were not able to recall tool challenges because the challenges had been resolved as they arose. Interviewees attributed the success of the tool in great part to the personality of the development team and to their embedded position. - Amanda Cravens, Ph.D., Stanford University
The free and open-source code for MarineMap ([https://code.google.com/p/marinemap/][2]) combined a number of technologies including PostGIS, GeoDjango, the Google Earth API, Python, and, in early interations, OpenLayers.
SeaSketch
With a $500,000 gift from Jack Dangermond, the founder and President of Esri, and matching funds from the New Zealand Department of Conservation, the McClintock Lab launched SeaSketch (seasketch.org) in 2012. SeaSketch is a web-based GIS platform designed for marine spatial planners and ocean resource managers who need to engage partner agencies and stakeholders in decisions about ocean resources. In SeaSketch, planners can set up an online collaborative workspace where stakeholders in a planning process can sketch plan elements (e.g. marine protected areas, aquaculture sites, offshore energy facilities), understand the potential consequences of them, and work with other users to refine plans in a collaborative manner.
SeaSketch is also used to conduct surveys and gather geospatial information about the distribution of resources and human activities in and around the ocean. Using a simple interface, SeaSketch project administrators may configure and launch public or private online surveys, asking stakeholders to identify where they fish, take their boat, saw a whale, etc. In this way, SeaSketch may be used to quickly gather data and facilitate marine spatial planning.
The first version of SeaSketch (https://legacy.seasketch.org) hosted approximately 50 mature projects, 300 student projects and 400 demonstration projects (https://legacy.seasketch.org/projects). Using this platform, The McClintock lab developed customized SeaSketch projects for planning, and supported implementation in British Columbia (Marine Planning Partnership of the North Pacific Coast), New Zealand (Department of Conservation), Barbuda, Montserrat, Curaçao and Bermuda (Wait Institute), the United Kingdom (Joint Nature Conservation Committee), Australia (New South Wales Department of Primary Industries), Michigan (Michigan Energy Options), the Cook Islands (Cook Islands Government), Denmark (NIVA), Sweden (SWAM), Azores (DRAM), several locations in the United States (NOAA, BOEM, Northeast Regional Ocean Council), the Mediterranean Sea (UNEP-MAP), the Galapagos Islands (Galapagos Marine Park Authority), and global scale projects.
In 2020, the McClintock lab received funding from the Waitt Foundation to re-develop SeaSketch from the gound up. The new, completely free and open source version of SeaSketch (https://www.seasketch.org) includes a host of exciting new features. For more information on creating your own SeaSketch project or using others, please read our user and administrators documentation. Developers will also be interested in reading our documentation on how to create geoprocessing services and reports for the SeaSketch planning tool.