Humans impose significant impacts on our ocean ecosystems, but we also derive valuable benefits, tangible and intangible, from our activities. Sustainable management of our oceans requires ongoing holistic assessment of the entire social-ecological system - accounting for people and coastal communities as part of a functioning healthy ecosystem. The Ocean Health Index (OHI) is a framework to understand and assess the status of our oceans, incorporating environmental and ecological data on equal footing with data on economic, demographic, and social dimensions.
Results/Conclusions
In this talk I will explore the variety of data sources used to inform a regional application of the OHI framework to British Columbia's coastal waters, demonstrating the flexibility of OHI to accommodate local values, needs, and data around ocean use. Many of the datasets required significant effort to prepare from such sources as government reports, census data, and bureaucratic records, and I will highlight several examples of non-ecological data we used to inform our understanding of ocean health including water pollution pressures, First Nations resource access, and community well being.