AN ANALYSIS OF THE MARINE CORPS AVIATION TRAINING SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS LIFE CYCLE

This capstone applied project examines the suitability of the current requirements life cycle for Marine Corps aviation training systems, including new programs and upgrades. Methodology includes a comprehensive review of existing policies and processes as well as interviews with key stakeholders. Analysis has identified weaknesses in the areas of training-focused requirements generation as well as portfolio management across Marine Corps training system programs. Recommendations include integrating modeling and simulation (M&S) expertise into the Training Management Process (TMP) and full implementation of Training Systems Certification (TSC) and Systematic Team Assessment of Readiness Training (START) tools to improve requirement relevancy to training needs as well as improved portfolio management for Marine Corps training systems led by Marine Corps Training and Education Command (TECOM). This capstone applied project concludes with recommendations for further study related to these matters.Major, United States Marine CorpsMajor, United States Marine CorpsApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Protecting the Pacific Important Pieces of the Regional Conservation Puzzle

The Pacific, Earth's largest ocean, is a complex ecosystem that supports life both at sea and on shore. Protecting this biodiversity is vital, which is why The Pew Charitable Trusts takes a comprehensive approach to ocean conservation in the Pacific region. Our goals include securing sustainable management for tuna populations, ending illegal fishing, protecting sharks, conserving biodiversity on the high seas, and ensuring a lasting ocean legacy by safeguarding some of the most special places in the ocean. Although there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to marine conservation, effective options are available that, with the right mix, can help create and sustain a healthy ocean. In every region, catch limits and gear regulations are essential management tools for fisheries. Closing off large areas to commercial activities can protect biodiversity, regenerate life, maintain a healthy balance within the ecosystem, and build resilience to change. New technologies can help fisheries managers with limited resources fight illegal fishing more effectively and monitor the health of coastal and marine ecosystems more efficiently. Equally important is the closing of loopholes in domestic and regional regulations that allow illicit fishing to go undetected and undeterred. The economic, environmental, and food security that comes from a vibrant ocean requires strengthened fisheries management, elimination of illicit practices, and designation of new sanctuaries and marine reserves. Pew is working with countries across the Pacific to put in place the necessary measures needed to help shape a sustainable ocean future that best secures the region's short- and long-term needs. These are critical pieces needed to complete the ocean puzzle

International cooperation for sustainable fisheries in the Baltic Sea

The complexity of the political and ecological situation in the Baltic Sea area calls for strong international cooperation in order to achieve economically and socially sustainable, environmentally safe fisheries. Management needs to be flexible to allow for direct reactions and adjustments in case of any natural or anthropogenic adverse impacts. At the same time, a minimum of income stability from the transboundary, hence internationally shared, fish resources in the Baltic Sea should be guaranteed to local fishing communities. The article under consideration analyses the past, present and future situation of fisheries management in the Baltic Sea. Emphasis is put on the functioning of the European Community’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). In order to achieve sustainable fisheries, the conservation of stocks is of prime importance. The new CFP as of December 2002 provides for this objective by introducing long-term management and recovery plans, emphasising the necessity of a healthy marine ecosystem, and allowing for flexible management tools. It is therefore concluded that Baltic Sea fisheries management is likely to benefit, if the opportunities for improvement, which the new CFP regulation has enshrined, are realised.fisheries

EcoGIS – GIS tools for ecosystem approaches to fisheries management

Executive Summary: The EcoGIS project was launched in September 2004 to investigate how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), marine data, and custom analysis tools can better enable fisheries scientists and managers to adopt Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries Management (EAFM). EcoGIS is a collaborative effort between NOAA’s National Ocean Service (NOS) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and four regional Fishery Management Councils. The project has focused on four priority areas: Fishing Catch and Effort Analysis, Area Characterization, Bycatch Analysis, and Habitat Interactions. Of these four functional areas, the project team first focused on developing a working prototype for catch and effort analysis: the Fishery Mapper Tool. This ArcGIS extension creates time-and-area summarized maps of fishing catch and effort from logbook, observer, or fishery-independent survey data sets. Source data may come from Oracle, Microsoft Access, or other file formats. Feedback from beta-testers of the Fishery Mapper was used to debug the prototype, enhance performance, and add features. This report describes the four priority functional areas, the development of the Fishery Mapper tool, and several themes that emerged through the parallel evolution of the EcoGIS project, the concept and implementation of the broader field of Ecosystem Approaches to Management (EAM), data management practices, and other EAM toolsets. In addition, a set of six succinct recommendations are proposed on page 29. One major conclusion from this work is that there is no single “super-tool” to enable Ecosystem Approaches to Management; as such, tools should be developed for specific purposes with attention given to interoperability and automation. Future work should be coordinated with other GIS development projects in order to provide “value added” and minimize duplication of efforts. In addition to custom tools, the development of cross-cutting Regional Ecosystem Spatial Databases will enable access to quality data to support the analyses required by EAM. GIS tools will be useful in developing Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) and providing pre- and post-processing capabilities for spatially-explicit ecosystem models. Continued funding will enable the EcoGIS project to develop GIS tools that are immediately applicable to today’s needs. These tools will enable simplified and efficient data query, the ability to visualize data over time, and ways to synthesize multidimensional data from diverse sources. These capabilities will provide new information for analyzing issues from an ecosystem perspective, which will ultimately result in better understanding of fisheries and better support for decision-making. (PDF file contains 45 pages.

KB WOT Fisheries 2018: maintaining excellence and innovation in fisheries research

The KB WOT Fisheries programme is developed to maintain and develop expertise needed to carry out the Dutch statutory obligations in fisheries monitoring and advice. The KB WOT Fisheries programme developed for 2018 reflects the scientific and management needs of the WOT fisheries programme. The strength of KB WOT Fisheries lies in the top-down development of the programme while allowing bottomup input, with calls for proposals, to ensure innovation and improvement. To avoid missing research priorities relevant to WOT and LNV needs, the programme is built from a closed call for proposals to WOT Fisheries project leaders. But these WOT project leaders are requested to seek input from other Wageningen Marine Research scientists to ensure innovation. The KB WOT Fisheries programme will fund 17 projects in 2018 which will focus on monitoring and remote sensing of (shell) fish in marine and freshwater ecosystems, new methods and tools for surveys, discard and catch sampling and investigating the effects of fisheries. International exchange of new expertise and developments, as well as continuous quality assurance (for collecting, storage and analyses of data), forms a major part of the programm

A dark hole in our understanding of marine ecosystems and their services : perspectives from the mesopelagic community

In the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures acting on the Earth system, urgent actions are needed to guarantee efficient resource management and sustainable development for our growing human population. Our oceans - the largest underexplored component of the Earth system - are potentially home for a large number of new resources, which can directly impact upon food security and the wellbeing of humanity. However, the extraction of the resources fostered by marine ecosystems has repercussions for biodiversity and the oceans ability to sequester green house gases and thereby climate. In the search for new “resources to unlock the economic potential of the global oceans, recent observations have identified a large unexploited biomass of mesopelagic fish living in the deep ocean. This biomass has recently been estimated to be 10 billion metric tonnes, at least 10 times larger than previous estimates. If we are able to exploit this community at sustainable levels without impacting upon biodiversity and compromising the oceans’ ability to sequester carbon, we can produce more food and potentially many new nutraceutical products. However, to meet the needs of present generations without compromising the needs of future generations, we need to guarantee a sustainable exploitation of these resources. To do so requires a holistic assessment of the community and an understanding of the mechanisms controlling this biomass, its role in the preservation of biodiversity and its influence on climate as well as management tools able to weigh the costs and benefits of exploitation of this community

Accomack County, Virginia Shoreline Inventory Report Methods and Guidelines

In the 1970s, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) received a grant through the National Science Foundation’s Research Applied to National Needs Program to develop a series of reports that would describe the condition of tidal shorelines in the Commonwealth of Virginia. These reports became known as the Shoreline Situation Reports. They were published on a locality by locality basis with additional resources provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Coastal Zone Management (Hobbs et al., 1975). The Shoreline Situation Reports quickly became a common desktop reference for nearly all shoreline managers, regulators, and planners within the Tidewater region. They provided useful information to address the common management questions and dilemmas of the time. Despite their age, these reports remain a desktop reference. The Comprehensive Coastal Inventory Program (CCI) is committed to developing a revised series of Shoreline Situation Reports that address the management questions of today and take advantage of new technology. New techniques integrate a combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS) and remote sensing technology. Reports are now distributed electronically unless resources become available for hardcopy distribution. The digital GIS shape files, along with reports, tools, and tables are available on the web at http://ccrm.vims.edu/gis_data_maps/shoreline_inventories/index.html by clicking on Accomack County

A Geography of Marine Farming Rights in New Zealand: Some Rubbings of Patterns on the Face of the Sea

Sustainable development of global marine resources has been the focus of various United Nations' agencies and coastal nations since World War II. As capture fisheries resources have come under pressure and perhaps reached their sustainable limit concern has been expressed over the ability to continue to meet the protein needs of expanding populations. One potentially significant contributor to addressing the food needs of the world is marine farming (mariculture). The expansion of marine farming in developing countries has been well-addressed in the literature, but marine farming in developed countries has received less attention. The traditional biophysical requirements of marine farming (sheltered clean water of appropriate depth) have led to conflicts with other users of the coastal environment. In the developed countries in particular, suitable sites are contested places of consumption (recreation, tourism) as well as production (capture fisheries). Moreover, the adjacent terrestrial land and water uses can significantly affect acceptability of marine farming. The avoidance of conflicts and the achievement of sustainable development in such settings are largely dependent on the systems of governance. In developed countries, these are often articulated through planning regimes and associated 'rights'. The global terrestrial planning response in the first two thirds of the 20th Century was dominated by a modernist approach to planning. In the later stages, a post-modern challenge coincided with the rise of neo-liberalism in many developed countries. Planning in New Zealand has shown a similar pattern. The extent to which modern, postmodern and neo-liberal approaches might have been manifest in the marine environment, especially with regard to marine farming, has received little attention. In most developed countries there has been an institutional separation between terrestrial and marine administrative agencies that has resulted in conflict between these agencies and between the regimes they work within and help create. Integrated Coastal Management emerged as a response to this situation and had become the dominant planning regime for coastal resources by the last decade of the 20th Century. It was largely uncritically promoted and accepted, especially by United Nations and coastal state government agencies. These themes provide the broad theoretical and practical context for this thesis. Since the 1970s, there has been a revolutionary break in New Zealand's resource management from a centralized command and control style of modernist planning to a neo-liberal, planning regime characterised by elements of modernism and postmodernism. Concurrently it has revamped, but failed to integrate, coastal and fisheries management and planning. Ironically, each of the resulting primary marine resource management statutes (the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA) and the Fisheries Act 1983/1996 (FA83/96)) is considered to implement a world-leading model. Marine farming lies at the interface between the regimes created by these and preceding Acts and the nature of the regimes is explored in relation to marine farming. The development of the regimes and the rationale for them is set out with the aid of Scott's (1989, 2000b) axial model of the characteristics of a property right. The thesis groups the development of the New Zealand planning regimes for marine farming into four era: pre-modern (1866-1964), proto-modern (1964-1971), modern (1971-1991), and transitional (1991-2001). The evolution of the industry is shown largely to follow a generalized model of the industry in developed countries. This suggests that the nature of the property rights available for marine farming in New Zealand is not of great significance in the general development of the industry. The planning regime, however, significantly affects the spatial pattern of development of the industry. An analysis of provisions for marine farms in various plans suggests quite different planning 'styles' and approaches have been adopted in different parts of the country at different times. A Geographic Information System of all individual marine farms in New Zealand is developed to the stage where it can be combined with other data to investigate the spatial patterns that have evolved in New Zealand. A typology of patterns of farm arrangement in relation to other farms is apparent from the resultant mapped information. These patterns are shown to represent the outcomes of a combination of competing rights and the responses of and to the contemporaneous planning regimes. The consequences of adopting different styles of planning are apparent. This macro-level research is extended to the micro-level by an exploration of variables affecting the individual farmer's locational decisions. A national postal questionnaire survey of marine farm owners yielded 148 usable responses (32% response rate). Inferential statistical analytical tools were used to test the significance of relationships between particular variables. Multivariate analyses were used to cluster the respondents and the variables and to search for latent factors. These analyses supported field interview findings with regard to the importance of particular variables, especially planning regimes in directing the location and nature of marine farming. The results enabled development of a descriptive model for exploring and comparing the quality of different means of acquiring marine space for marine farming. The analyses also confirmed that significant changes were occurring within the structure of the industry. Analysis of the field interviews, maps, policy documents, Environment Court decisions and other secondary material shows the major capture fishing companies are increasingly dominating the industry. There was a notable presence of a category of 'entrepreneur site developers' exploiting the neo-liberal nature of the planning regimes of the 1990s to open up new areas for marine farming on scales unprecedented in the rest of the world. The consequent race for space has met with stiff resistance from the capture fishing industry, but more especially from the recreational sector. This has led to significant transaction costs. The Government response, a partial moratorium on marine farm development in November 2001, is shown to emulate the modernist command and control style of planning of twenty years earlier and to signal a failure of neo-liberal ideology to meet the needs of the industry and the public at large

Bioeconomic Modelling for Fisheries

Current fisheries advice requires an increased consideration of bioeconomics and the interactions of fishing fleets with the biological stocks. This is particularly important when evaluating proposed multi-annual management plans. To achieve this, modelling tools need to be able to consider the dynamics of individual fisheries. This becomes more challenging with mixed fisheries when multiple species are caught by multiple fleets. A suitable balance needs to be found between replicating the details of the complex fishery system and simplifying a model to the level that makes it tractable but still useful. Much of the bioeconomic fisheries modelling work performed at the JRC uses the FLR software framework. The JRC has developed a new FLR package, FLasher, for performing projections and forecasts with multiple individual fisheries and multiple species. This allows the dynamics of mixed fisheries to be more accurately modelled and allows the evaluation of the economic performance of alternative management decisions. This document presents some of the features and capabilites of FLasher using a case study based on a semi-realistic flatfish fishery: two fleets with different selectiviuty patterns, bottom trawl and gillnet, catching two species with different life histories and maximum sizes, European plaice (Pleuronectes platessa) and common sole (Solea solea). FLasher expands the current modelling capabilities of FLR, allowing the impacts of proposed management plans to be evaluated in greater detail by (1) explicitly modelling the dynamics of each individual fleets, which could be affected in different ways by management, (2) forecasting in parallel the full species and fleet assemblage found in mixed fisheries, and (3) employing the latest iteration of the C++ language and a new library for automatic differentation.JRC.D.2-Water and Marine Resource

Practical implementation of robotic technologies for the inspection of ships

The ROBINS project aims at filling the technology and regulatory gaps that today still represent a barrier to the adoption of Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in activities related to inspection of ships, starting from understanding end user\u2019s actual needs and expectations and analyzing how existing or near-future technology can meet them. -Robotics technology: Improve the ability of RAS in sensing and probing; Improve capabilities in navigation and localization in confined spaces, access to and mobility within the environment; Improve safety and dependability of RAS in hazardous, harsh and dirty environments; Provide new tools for image and data processing (3D models, VR/AR environments); Provide the same level of information as obtained by direct human observation for the assessment of inspected structures. -Rules and Regulations: Provide a framework for the assessment of equivalence between the outcomes of RAS-assisted inspections and traditional inspection procedures; Define criteria, testing procedures and metrics for the evaluation of RAS performance; Design, implement and assess a testing environment where repeatable tests and measurements of RAS performance can be carried out; Improve confidence in technology capabilities by means of test campaigns to be performed both in the testing facilities and onboard. The expected impact can be summarized as follows: Wide scale adoption of RAS technology in marine industry Improved safety in ship surveys Economic advantages new supply chain and new potential markets particularly beneficial for SMEs; new services and products for data processing and knowledge management; reduction of costs related to inspection activities; improvement in the quality and variety of inspection services; new certification schemes for equipment, operators and procedures