West Coast Regional Planning Body Recommendations – March 3, 2016

Greetings West Coast Ocean Data Network, Spring is almost here (though El nino might have something left to say about that!) and with that we have some important announcements to share with you.

West Coast Regional Planning Body

As the West Coast Regional Planning Body (RPB)  finalizes it’s governance charter, the WCODP has been exploring opportunities to support regional and sub-regional marine planning. To better inform our work, the WCODP developed a set of draft recommendations regarding WCODP and WCODN roles, priority data gaps, and priority data catalogs to connect. We are currently seeking feedback from RPB members around these recommendations and hope to take next steps in April.

As part of that strategy, we wanted to share these draft recommendations with the WCODN and encourage Network members to participate in one of three working groups who will be carrying out activities over the next year to implement these recommendations. We will be scheduling the first of these calls at the end of March and encourage interested Network members to indicate availability for one or more groups by March 11th. Let the WCODP Coordinator know if you have any questions. 

New Kelp Data Available

In conjunction with BOEM and Marine Cadastre, we are pleased to announce the release a new, unique regional data set representing the extent of canopy forming kelp beds along the West Coast. You can read more and access the data here.  This compliments the release of new littoral cell and fishery closed areas data that was released last fall.


You can visit the West Coast Ocean Data Portal at http://portal.westcoastoceans.org.

If you wish to learn more or contribute your data to the Portal, please contact Todd Hallenbeck (Todd.r.hallenbeck@Westcoastoceans.org).