Establishing Consumptive and Nonconsumptive Human Use Baseline Indicators for MPAs in the South Coast of California

People are the focus of this baseline-monitoring project. In particular, social scientists leading this project are documenting human behavior at the coast. They will observe what, where and how often, and how much people spend for three sectors of the ocean economy: (1) private recreation, which includes activities such clamming, beach walking, diving, photography, surfing and birding; (2) commercial fishing, and (3) commercial passenger fishing vessels (aka “party boats”) that may take people out fishing or whale watching. The core outcome of the project will be a series of standardized, fully documented, and quantitative socioeconomic data sets and maps. These will be used to establish an initial snapshot of human-use “indicators” for the South Coast MPAs and to assess initial changes in how people enjoy the water and commercially fish along the coast. Scientists will also attempt to identify key socioeconomic metrics and a modeling framework for understanding cause-and-effect relationships between ecosystem features, human-use patterns and MPAs.