Site Characterization scope, format and future

MBNMS Site Characterization scope, format and future

The goals of this site characterization are to assemble existing information about the natural resources of the MBNMS into an easily accessed and searched summary, and to create a companion bibliographic database which includes all pertinent reference material (peer-reviewed and "gray") acquired during the project. The primary audience targeted for this project, as agreed upon in an early project scoping meeting, includes resource managers, scientists and higher-level educational institutions.

In the first phase of this project, information about the natural resources of the MBNMS is succinctly summarized in nineteen sections written by more than two dozen experts; these sections are broadly organized into three categories: 1) Physical Setting,
2) Biological Communities and Assemblages, and
3) Human Influences. Thanks to technology which has allowed us to format this document in hypertext markup language (HTML), we have also been able to highlight many of the physical and biological links which are an integral part of the topics addressed. This project is therefore geared for use via internet or CD-ROM. A limited number of CDs and a hard copy of this summary and companion bibliography (which is very unwieldy in comparison to the digital versions) are available from the MBNMS office in Monterey, California.

The original scope of this project as proposed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Sanctuaries and Reserve Division (U.S. Dept. of Commerce 1994) has been divided into multiple phases beginning with the topics covered here. Most importantly, the MBNMS/NOAA and the Phase I awardee (Moss Landing Marine Laboratories) agreed that information regarding Historical, Archaeological and Cultural Resources could be comprehensively summarized only if addressed during a second phase of the project. This second phase will also prove invaluable in adding natural resource information which was previously overlooked or incomplete at the time of the project's scheduled end date. Finally, we hope the second phase will create a precedent for continual updates of the bibliographic database, and will include even those bibliographic entries not yet available in digital form. (With few exceptions, only references already in a digital document - e.g. in Word, WordPerfect, ProCite - were included in this Phase I bibliographic database.)