Purpose

This digital library contains national and state level laws that apply to the ocean and coast within the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem.

In order to move forward in solving problems caused by fragmented ocean management, we need to evaluate extant management practices comprehensively. This site provides statutes and regulations, which include important information about how the oceans and coasts are managed. The collection available through this website provides a publicly accessible collection to search laws and regulations within and across states and nations.

To begin, visit the Search page

Related Work

Visit minoe.stanford.edu to download MINOE - a software application for exploring ocean management through ecosystems.

About the Collection

This comprehensive set of coastal and ocean related laws and regulations for the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem was compiled as part of Julie Ekstrom's dissertation project under Dr. Oran Young at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The compilation allowed her to explore and develop text analysis techniques on a body of documents that represent multiple sectors and multiple jurisdictions for the ocean domain.

Given the high interest from resource users, government agencies, academic scientists and others in accessing the collection, this website and search engine are being created so that anyone may freely and easily search the compilation. In addition to traditional search results (as a list, ranked by relevance), we are exploring additional ways to convey users' search results dynamically. At this time, users may graph which agencies are in charge of the laws and/or regulations that pertain to their search queries.

The compilation on this site represents one point in time (Year 2006). If we receive enough interest, we will update this collection or create the parallel work for a different region. We welcome and are grateful for your feedback!

Support

This site is made possible by funding provided by the California Sea Grant, NCEAS and the UC Marine Council.