American Scientist

The ocean connects us all, playing vital roles in food security, livelihoods, climate regulation, transportation, and even the oxygen we breathe. It is also strongly impacted by the policy choices our governments make. As an interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist, I spend my time working at the science-policy interface, trying to use science to maximize the benefits that humans get from the ocean while minimizing our impacts on its delicate ecosystems and threatened species. That’s why I’m excited about the National Ocean Biodiversity Strategy put forward by the Biden-Harris Administration.

Comparative policy analyses show that the United States manages its natural resources relatively well, adequately balancing human needs with those of nature. However, any bureaucracy as large as the U.S. Government is bound to have issues of inefficiency, complexity, overlapping jurisdictions, and paperwork. As President Barack Obama quipped in his January 2011 State of the Union address, “The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in freshwater, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.” The former president’s description was not entirely accurate because agencies in fact cooperate on salmon management (sea turtles would have been a better example), but his point about government overlap and effort duplication stands. Indeed, at times, the process is even more convoluted, involving agencies like the U.S. Forest Service (streams sometimes pass through National Forests), or the Army Corps of Engineers (which controls some dams). It’s hard to get everyone working together; sometimes it’s hard to even identify everyone who should be working together.

A Better Way

The National Ocean Biodiversity Strategy, released this summer by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, aims to coordinate efforts across U.S. government agencies to wisely manage ocean resources. “There has been a lot of amazing work happening by federal government agencies, by academics, by nonprofits, and so on, but it’s not aways very well coordinated,” says coauthor Emmett Duffy, chief scientist of the Smithsonian Institution’s MarineGeo Program.

The timing couldn’t be better for the launch of this important new strategy. As Jeff Watters, vice president of external affairs for the Ocean Conservancy, one of the world’s largest science-based ocean conservation nonprofits, told me, “There are a number of vital issues we’re facing today in which we have a particular inflection point, where the jury’s out on whether we’re going to do the right thing or not.”

Knowledge Expansion

“Driving delivery of ocean biodiversity knowledge at a national scale” is the first of three goals of the new strategy. It includes standardizing data-gathering as well as coordinating what sort of data we want to collect, and what sorts of questions we need to answer. These issues hit home for me, as some of my doctoral research originally involved comparing the recreational fishing mortality of shark species between U.S. states—before I had to abandon it because the way Florida collects data differs from the way other states do it, making the comparisons I wanted to make impossible.

The strategy calls for bringing together everyone involved in collecting and using data, including federal agencies, state counterparts, local and municipal governments, tribes, and private industry groups. It calls for all data to be “interoperable, reproducible, authoritative, formatted appropriately, and available publicly for multiple uses,” with the goal of informing wise decision-making at all scales of government. Moreover, while this isn’t stressed in the strategy, doing things this way will make it easier to share data with our colleagues around the world.

New Tools

Goal number two involves “strengthening tools and institutions to improve delivery of ocean biodiversity knowledge,” which means trying to make it so we can generate more data and get it to end users like communities and government agencies as quickly as possible. This includes modernizing research infrastructure for the needs of today and the future.

In our conversation, Duffy emphasized the challenges of studying aquatic life but added that advancements over the past two decades offer new opportunities: “We need to strengthen these tools and develop new ones as we figure out the best ways to track biodiversity and get those methods standardized and coordinated between research teams.”

These innovations will make it easier for scientists to do our jobs, both in the United States and around the world. The strategy mentions lots of tools specifically, including open access and standardized data repositories, real-time tracking of large animals such as sharks to inform beachgoer safety efforts, and environmental DNA (which lets scientists determine if certain species have been in the area by detecting small traces of their DNA in water samples). A stated goal is to “build capacity for near real-time forecasting of ocean ecosystem dynamics comparable to the weather forecasting that Americans use every day.” As a conservation scientist who often must wait months to learn about the status of certain ecosystems by reading about them in Appendix 347 of a giant annual report, I am elated at the inclusion of such an ambition.

Conservation and Sustainable Use

The strategy’s final goal is to “protect, conserve, restore, and sustainably use ocean biodiversity for the good of all Americans.” Here, the aim is to ensure that future generations can always benefit from the ocean’s bounty. This explicitly includes creating partnerships with key stakeholder groups, educating the public, and getting people involved in both scientific discoveries and sustainable management. While goals like this have been implicitly part of various laws, regulations, and management agreements, it’s heartening to see them as the focus of a new direction for government-wide ocean science and management.

Next Steps

The National Ocean Biodiversity Strategy is a set of high-level goals. While goals are great, it’s how we implement them that matters. To that end, Watters says he’s anxious about the outcome of the upcoming U.S. presidential election—and about Project 2025, a detailed blueprint by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with ties to Donald Trump, which among other things calls for sweeping changes across federal agencies. “Project 2025 specifically goes after a lot of this stuff; [these programs are] something that a conservative administration would try to immediately undo.”

Duffy is more optimistic about the broad appeal of this work. “Our desired outcome is for everyone to realize that biodiversity needs to be central to how we think about ocean activities, including development, industry, transportation, and more,” he said. “And if we work together, there are many ways to do that which are a win-win over the long term for everybody.”