A healthy, abundant ocean full of diverse life-forms is California’s natural heritage. In addition to providing residents with a breath-taking place to live—and the rest of the world with a breath-taking place to visit!—the Pacific Ocean contributes billions to the California economy, through direct materials, ecosystem services, and services provided for coastal activities, such as recreation and tourism.

In 1999 California passed the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), a law mandating the creation of a network of Marine Protected Areas along the California Coast. Marine Protected Areas are areas of the ocean set aside for preservation and protection of resources. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) come in all shapes and sizes, and can range from conservation areas, which might limit certain activities while continuing to allow others, to marine reserves, which prohibit all extractive activities. Marine Reserves are like underwater Yosemities—special places that we want to preserve in perpetuity.

The effort to implement the MLPA has taken years, but it’s been worth the wait! The Central Coast, which covers northern Santa Barbara to Año Nuevo, was the first region to be considered. A lengthy and thorough stakeholder process was convened, in which conservationists, fishermen, divers, and scientists came together to develop a network of MPAs that met clear scientific guidelines.

Protecting habitat has long been seen as a pillar of conservation; species after all are part of a network of life, and cannot survive in isolation of the systems that provide them food, shelter, and places to reproduce, raise young, and defend themselves. You wouldn’t be able to either! The Otter Project saw the MLPA as an opportunity to further the shared goals of sea otter recovery and marine conservation. We devoted a substantial amount of time to furthering the conservation values of the MLPA. The result was a strong network of reserves and conservation areas running throughout the core of the sea otter range.

Marine protected areas are portrayed as controversial sometimes because they are seen as closing off access. In reality, most MPAs continue to allow open access. People can swim, dive, walk and boat through MPAs. Certain activities like fishing might be displaced, but only minimally. Most of the coastline remains open to fishing; MPAs simply reserve some space for the rest of us.

Marine protected areas work—there’s no question about it. They result in healthier ecosystems, and more and bigger fish. Protecting these special places is a long-term investment in California’s future that we can’t afford not to make.

Find out more about:

• The Science of Marine Protected Areas
• The Policy--MLPA Initiative

What we’re doing now

The Otter Project works in otter habitat past and present. That means we are invested in preserving the entire California coastline—especially in areas where sea otters reside or may reside in the future. We support the continuation of the MLPA process, and have spoken for a strong network of reserves in the Northern Central Coast (from Pigeon Point to Point Arena) and the Southern Coast (From Santa Barbara to the Baja border).

Our main activity right now is supporting the implementation of MPAs in the Central Coast, the heart of sea otter range.

Now that MPAs have been established state agencies have the monumental task of making sure that regulations are followed! The Otter Project is supporting Central Coast MPAs with a new program, MPA Watch. MPA Watch trains citizen volunteers to monitor resource use in and around MPAs to assess compliance to new regulations, as well as to collect useful information on the ways people interact with the new protected areas. MPAs are like parks, and people go to parks to play, interact with nature, and recreate. We think marine parks will be no exception, and we want to document both activities that may pose a threat to resource protection, as well as all the ways in which marine protected areas are valuable to the residents and visitors of California.

Volunteers will be asked to conduct shore-based monitoring rounds, in which they will record activity and resource use. The information will be used to understand the social aspect of reserve management, and to inform the management process as these new MPAs are evaluated in the future.

We are recruiting volunteers for MPA Watch—to find out about our upcoming opportunities to get involved, visit our volunteer home page.