A long term goal of BoFEP has been to produce an environmental health index (EHI) for the Bay of Fundy. A 2012-2013 BoFEP project, including a workshop held in St. Andrews in April 2013, determined that the Ocean Health Index (OHI) (www.oceanhealthindex.org) offered a good model for an EHI for the Bay of Fundy. Now BoFEP will be holding a second workshop so that the wider Bay of Fundy community can help direct the work to finalize an OHI score.
EHIs combine the assessments of a number of environmental indicators, e.g., dissolved oxygen levels, statistics on biodiversity, etc., into one score, number, or grade meant to represent the overall state or health of an ecosystem. An EHI is believed to offer a simpler way to communicate complex information about the state of an ecosystem to stakeholders, policy makers, and the general public.
Based on further input from the 2013 workshop’s attendees, it was proposed that the OHI methodology be tested by trying to develop an OHI score for the Southwest New Brunswick Bay of Fundy Marine Resources Planning Area (MRPA). This decision was based on 1) there being known community values for the MRPA, and 2) the larger amount of data available for the MRPA ecosystem when compared to the rest of the Bay of Fundy.
The Ocean Health Index (OHI) was developed by a group of over 60 marine scientists who published in 2012, 2013, and 2014, global OHI scores for the world’s oceans and individual OHI scores for 221 exclusive economic zones (EEZs), including Canada.
The OHI’s goal is to provide “a robust, widely applicable tool for ongoing assessment of ocean health based on well-accepted societal goals and a key benchmark against which to compare future progress and inform comprehensive ocean policy”1 (Halpern et al. 2012 at p. 4). The OHI is based on the assessment of ten goals, and for some goals, their sub-goals, for all waters within the 221 exclusive economic zones (EEZs).
Since the publishing of its initial global scores, the OHI group has been working on adapting the OHI global methodology for use in describing the health of regional, i.e., smaller, marine and coastal areas. The intent of the regional OHI scoring is to use better or more refined data than that used for the global OHI scores.
In 2014, BoFEP received funding from Environment Canada and DFO to work on developing scores for five OHI goals for the MRPA. BoFEP chose the five OHI goals that best captured the community values of the MRPA. These values had been previously identified by the MRPA’s Marine Advisory Committee in the mid-2000s.
The five OHI goals BoFEP has been working with are:
1. Sense of Place (protected areas and iconic species)
2. Food Provision
3. Coastal Livelihoods and Economies
4. Clean Waters
5. Biodiversity
A plus and minus of the OHI methodology is that it is very data intensive; over 70 different layers of data are used. Given this, much of the work of BoFEP in 2014 was dedicated to finding the necessary data. During this time, the OHI was developing a number of guides and a “toolbox” to assist in OHI regionalization efforts.
In a nutshell, the OHI toolbox allows users to enter their data and calculate scores for the various goals. Unfortunately, it is more complicated than this as use of the toolbox requires someone who is proficient in the R programming language. (R is an open-source programming language that is used a lot for statistical work. It is becoming increasingly popular, particularly among university graduate students.) However, if you know how to use R, then the toolbox becomes very flexible, with different data and changes to data being easily accommodated. In a way the toolbox can become a planning tool, able to provide scores for different inputted scenarios and/or data.
In 2015, BoFEP received further funding from Environment Canada to hire an R programmer to work with the OHI toolbox. We are now looking for help from the broader Fundy community. The workshop will be held on September 29, 9 to 4 at the St. Andrews Biological Station.
Please contact Scott Kidd or Marianne Janowicz if you are interested in attending and receiving further notices about the workshop.
Purposes of workshop:
1. Update attendees on status of project, including presenting scores for five OHI goals (Food Provision, Livelihoods and Economies, Sense of Place, Clean Waters, and Biodiversity) for the SW Bay of Fundy Marine Resources Planning Area.
2. Get input and feedback from attendees about future management decisions that could be made to change the scores for the five selected OHI goals. The OHI program can be used to predict the outcomes of these decisions .For example, would creating a new marine protected area increase the MRPA’s “Sense of Place” score, and if so, by how much.
1. Halpern, B.S., et al. 2012. An index to assess the health and benefits of the global ocean. Nature (online: doi:10.1038/nature11397). Available at: http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/About/Methods/.
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