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Florida BlueWays

Florida BlueWays is a marine resource management project that the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) has been involved in over the last few years. The program, funded by the Department of Environmental Protection's Florida Coastal Management Program, assesses current management scenarios and programs within Florida in order to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, fill in gaps, and ultimately join existing management programs together under a single, unified management network.

Florida BlueWays addresses both the science and human use aspects in the environment and their subsequent impacts and roles within ocean management. The goal of Florida BlueWays is to develop innovative methods, tools, partnerships, and processes to address ecological and sociological concerns about coastal and ocean systems.

Marine resource management in Florida has been single-issue driven and lacks a unifying process or plan across regions, issues, laws, or stake-holder interest groups. FWRI has invested considerable resources to develop new methods, tools, techniques and organizational structures to move the BlueWays program toward a “regionally focused, data driven, place-based, approach to coastal management.”

The remaining challenge is to develop a defensible, conceptual framework and implementation strategy for building a process that can systematically focus research, management, funding, and stakeholder interests to provide maximum ecological protection for Florida’s coastal and marine ecosystem.

The Florida BlueWays project is being tested in Charlotte Harbor, one of the many estuaries in Florida. The Florida BlueWays process builds on landscape ecology principles, gap analysis tools, and GIS-based modeling techniques to describe competing opportunities and user conflicts in coastal and ocean systems.

The heart of the current characterization effort is a mapping process that will paint a data-driven picture of competing opportunities in Charlotte Harbor, Florida. Although this picture will address certain social and economic considerations, FWRI must devise new ways of modeling and investigating these considerations. For example, scale has been a confounding influence on the characterization process and continues to pose a significant methodological challenge.

In the end, the long-term goal of Florida BlueWays is to graphically articulate the inherent spatial connectivity of Florida's marine resources, coastal activities (human use), and related stakeholders.