Healthy Oceans. Healthy Communities.
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Ocean Ecosystems

Creating an ecosystem-based management plan

What is ecosystem-based management? Basically, it's a way of managing human activities that takes into account our cumulative impacts on ocean biodiversity, habitat, food webs, and water quality.

This is a new approach to doing things in the ocean - until now, we've only worried about our impacts on a handful of valuable species.

With ecosystem-based management, our scope is broadened to include non-commercial species, deep-sea corals and sponges, and so on.

Glass Sponge Reefs

Beneath Canada’s North Pacific waters lies a globally-unique biological treasure: glass sponge reefs. These sponge reefs are made from tiny glass spicules (needle-like skeletal elements), and were thought to have gone extinct during the Cretaceous period 145.5 to 65.5 million years ago. Scientists were very surprised when sponge reefs were discovered in Hecate Strait in 1987.

Ocean Ecosystems

Each day that we are alive, we literally live and breathe the ocean.

It doesn't matter where you live or what you do. If you are presently alive on the planet Earth, your life is inextricably intertwined with the ocean.

The ocean is present in the patterns of weather that we've come to expect, the supplies of fresh water that nourish our crops and reservoirs, and the seafood that is so important to so many. It is the source for half of the oxygen that you breathe.

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