Hello readers and happy new year!
Since this is my first time posting to the Sea Grant Scholars blog, I’ll give a brief introduction before launching into this 2025 Highlight post. My name is Amanda Gannon and I am a Natural Resource Policy Fellow working with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marine Reserves team. You can check out the Oregon Sea Grant Instagram page to see a short introductory video of some of the work I do (and then continue to scroll to see more of the awesome work being done by other Sea Grant Scholars and Fellows as well!)
When I began my role with ODFW, only a few months had gone by since the newest legislative mandate relating to marine reserves passed in the form of House Bill 4132 (2024). The bill included a suite of new requirements, including the call for a formalized adaptive management plan, new SMART objectives for our ecological monitoring and human dimensions research projects, and new goals for outreach and communication efforts. The stipulations of this new mandate abound with opportunities (and challenges) and I’ve had the joy and privilege to begin spearheading our efforts in the last year.
Most of my work ends up being behind-the-scenes, working internally with the agency to build a pathway forward for incorporating a formalized adaptive management framework into our existing structure. This largely manifests as working through structured decision making exercises with the team, drafting the text and structure of the adaptive management plan, and hours upon hours of focused reading and synthesizing of key documents from the last decade of the marine reserves program. However, walking through the best methods for constructing means-ends objective diagrams and dependency analyses wouldn’t make for a very interesting blog post; instead, I’d like to highlight one of the opportunities I’ve had to work directly with communities, engage with folks interested in and invested in the marine reserves, and see some of the beautiful sights Oregon has to offer.
Metrics that Matter – Community Focus Groups on the Oregon Coast
One part of HB 4132 calls for the Marine Reserves Human Dimensions project to create and implement a set of measurable social indicators. The Marine Reserves program has always emphasized the importance of balancing ecological conservation with the well-being of human communities that use, value, and rely on the ocean. Over a hundred variables related to this have been measured by the Human Dimensions team over the last decade of the Marine Reserve’s existence. Thus, the real challenge was to narrow down this list of variables to a set that was consistently measurable and relevant to the communities of place, interest, and practice surrounding the reserves.
To do this the Marine Reserves Human Dimensions team, led by project leader Dr. Sarah Klain, partnered with the UC Davis Environmental Policy Clinic. Together with professors and students in the Graduate Program of Environmental Policy and Management, the team set out to host a series of community-centered focus groups in towns near each of the five marine reserve sites in Oregon.
Successfully staging these brainstorming sessions was an exercise in collaborative gymnastics. Each event required many hands to manage the logistical coordination, presentation and activity development, and smooth implementation of the actual meeting. At each site, we were fortunate to have the support and collaboration of our Marine Reserves community teams: the North Coast Land Conservancy, Cascade Head Biosphere Collaborative, Friends of Otter Rock, Cape Perpetua Collaborative, and Redfish Rocks Community Team.
I’m currently collaborating on a manuscript for a forthcoming publication relating the details of this project, but in the meantime you can learn more about it and see the results of the focus groups in this report from the UC Davis team. We’re also planning to host a webinar to share these results back with our participants and to relay what upcoming endeavors with this project might look like. Stay tuned for future updates on this front!
Finally, I’d like to close this blog entry with a few photos of the Oregon coast I’ve taken in the last year. While most of the time I’m stationed in Newport, OR, for my work I’ve had many opportunities to explore other parts of the coast and visit each of the Marine Reserve sites, from Cape Falcon in the north all the way down to Redfish Rocks in the south. Each part of the coast has its unique charm.
If you’re reading this and you haven’t had the chance to explore the Oregon coast in all its wonderful, rocky glory then take this as your sign to adventure out to the coast sometime this year! Hopefully you’ll catch it on a sunny day, but I promise it’s just as gorgeous (and sometimes even more awe-inspiring) in the rain.
Cheers,
Amanda
