Prediction of marine ecosystem health: a decision support tool for coastal management

Canada has a huge coastal zone undergoing a variety of uses including industry, fisheries, aquaculture, tourism, residential, and agriculture. In many cases, substances introduced to coastal estuaries and bays are toxic or harmful in other ways, e.g. nutrients stimulating excess plant growth. Negative impacts affect the integrity of these areas, harming what is referred to as ecosystem health. Various government agencies have a mandate to oversee the coastal zone and maintain ecosystem health. One aspect of this protection involves prediction in advance of negative effects so that an activity such as fish plant discharge can be regulated to a level that does not harm the ecosystem. Our goal in the proposed research is to develop simple tools to provide managers with predictive capability. Based on an understanding of how different processes introduce and remove various materials in the water and bottom sediments, we will derive a series of indices of ecosystem health. We willuse statistical techniques to avoid arbitrary construction of indices and produce a software system to select the relative importance of different indices in contributing to an overall indicator of ecosystem health. Working with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Environment Canada, and several provincial agencies, we intend to deliver a decision support tool that will enable further capability to manage the coastal zone.