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NOAA Fisheries Strategic Plan
Habitat and Biodiversity - Objective 7
OBJECTIVE 7: Protect, conserve, and restore living marine resource habitat and biodiversity
The health of living marine resources is dependent upon the health of their habitat. No organism can live in isolation; all are dependent upon the health and biodiversity of the surrounding ecosystem, which provides the necessary ingredients of life. However, human activities can change, degrade, or destroy these habitats and the biodiversity associated with them. Habitat degradation is an important factor in the decline of many protected species and fish stocks.
Through research, consultation, and permit reviews, NOAA Fisheries seeks to protect these habitats from human-caused degradation while increasing our understanding of the interactions among living marine resources and the ecosystems they inhabit. We will use this increased understanding to develop the ability to manage resources by focusing on the entire ecosystem rather than on individual species or ecosystem components.
Where habitat loss has already occurred, NOAA Fisheries can effect a positive change through restoration of degraded habitats and creation of new habitat in areas that were previously unavailable or inadequate for use by living marine resources. These restoration efforts also counter-act continuing unavoidable losses of habitat.
Please note that our efforts to identify and conserve essential fish habitat are discussed under Objective 2.
Performance Measures:
In the next 5 years, NOAA Fisheries will:
- Protect and conserve wetlands which support living marine resources to achieve no net loss in accordance with national policy.
- Restore and create living marine resource habitat to offset unavoidable human-caused loss.
- Develop habitat baselines and monitoring methods that provide quantitative indicators of habitat status and program success.
Strategies
- We will conduct consultations on permit reviews, with continued emphasis on wetland, waterway, and hydropower permits. Full implementation of the es-sential fish habitat provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act will contribute to this strategy (see Objective 2 on pages 14 and 15).
- We will work with Congress and the Administration to incorporate conservation concerns in legislation affecting living marine resource habitat and review proposed legislation for language that would conflict with our habitat goals.
- We will implement cooperative approaches at the local level in habitat conservation and restoration, including greater involvement in the review of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission activities.
- We will work to remove human-caused impediments to anadromous fish passage through rivers and streams and to increase the survival of anadromous fish passing through hydroelectric facilities.
- We will work to reverse damage to living marine resources and their habitat resulting from oil and other contaminant spills.
- We will define the key aspects of vital habitat functions and increase our under-standing of how they affect marine and anadromous species and how they are af-fected by human activities. This will involve the development of new methods of evaluating the quality and productivity of restored habitats, as well as improved restoration and creation technologies, including contaminant remediation, to ensure that created habitats are effective.
- We will establish criteria to define and delineate marine, estuarine, and riverine ecosystems for management purposes, and we will identify indicators for assessing the status and detecting changes in the health of such ecosystems.
- We will establish an inventory of living marine resource habitats (tied to Our Living Oceans) and implement measures to monitor the trends in habitat availability.
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