45 research outputs found
Social Value of Marine and Coastal Protected Areas in England and Wales.
The U.K. government is committed to establishing a coherent network of marine protected
areas by 2012 and the recentMarine and Coastal Access Act, 2009 will designate
marine conservation zones and provide wider access rights to the coast. To fulfill these
goals, this article argues the need for a clearer, shared understanding of the social
value of protected areas in creating new designations and managing existing ones. Although
marine and coastal environments attract many people and are vitally important
in terms of realized and potential social value, the majority of the public in the United
Kingdom lacks understanding and awareness regarding them. Combined with this, the
social value of marine and coastal protected areas (MCPAs) have been largely ignored
relative to conservation and economics, with the latter invariably taking precedence
in environmental policymaking. Social value reflects the complex, individual responses
that people experience in a given place. Many reasons determine why one area is valued
above another, and this research investigates the social value of MCPAs from a
practitionerās perspective through a series of interviews. Understanding why we āsociallyā
value MCPAs will ultimately equip managers with an informed understanding
of these spaces, influence management decisions, and, potentially, policymaking. This
article defines social value in the context of MCPAs in England and Wales from a
practitioner perspective, explores key concepts, and suggests possible improvements in
decision-making
Navigating Public Microarray Databases
With the ever-escalating amount of data being produced by genome-wide microarray
studies, it is of increasing importance that these data are captured in public databases
so that researchers can use this information to complement and enhance their own
studies. Many groups have set up databases of expression data, ranging from large
repositories, which are designed to comprehensively capture all published data,
through to more specialized databases. The public repositories, such as ArrayExpress
at the European Bioinformatics Institute contain complete datasets in raw format in
addition to processed data, whilst the specialist databases tend to provide downstream
analysis of normalized data from more focused studies and data sources. Here we
provide a guide to the use of these public microarray resources