Research Technical Report

Study Area Profile 1990 to 2010, Socioeconomic Research and Monitoring Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary

Leeworthy, V.R., T. Culliton, and T. Reyer (April 2013)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Ocean Service, Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, Silver Spring, MD. 42 pp.

INTRODUCTION

This report is a product of the West Coast Region Socioeconomic Plan 2013 — 2014. “Study Area Profiles” were given a top priority for all Office of National Marine Sanctuary West Coast Region sites.

Study area profiles provide the basis of analyses to establish the dependencies of local communities/economies on sanctuary resource uses and for assessing how people can adapt to or mitigate policy/management changes that are estimated to impact their levels of use. Profiles include a county or collection of counties where the majority of economic impacts (e.g. sales/output, income and employment) and social impacts take place that are associated with use of sanctuary resources. A standard profile includes information on population, population density, demographics of the study area population (e.g. sex, race/ethnicity, age), poverty rate, unemployment rate, income by place of work/industry, employment by industry, income by place of residence, and per capita income. All of these measurements are available from existing sources and can be easily updated.

The geographic scope i.e. collection of counties that define a study area for a sanctuary is an evolving process. An intimal assessment is done based on past studies of sanctuary resource use and where the economic and social (socioeconomic) impacts were known to take place. In many cases, such as in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS), very little is known. Therefore the “Study Area” for MBNMS is a starting point and will be revised as additional research is conducted and more details become known about the extent of where socioeconomic impacts takes place from all the different uses of resources within the sanctuary. Figure 1 shows a map with all the counties highlighted that currently define the “Study Area” for MBNMS.