Welcome to OpenChannels, the community hub for sustainable ocean management and conservation

With the latest news, research, events, jobs, and more, OpenChannels makes it easy for you to stay informed on sustainable ocean management and conservation – including the practice of marine protected areas and ecosystem-based management. Over 80,000 ocean professionals used OpenChannels in the past year alone.

Getting started? Create a free user account and sign-up for our weekly e-mail updates.

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Questions? We're here to help you help the oceans!

E-mail either Allie Brown, OCTO's Communications and Outreach Director, at allie [at] octogroup.org or Raye Evrard, Project Manager for OpenChannels at raye [at] octogroup.org. 

You may also find us on Twitter @OpenOCTO or Facebook @OpenOCTO 

Join us for a webinar on Managing the ocean in real-time: Tools for dynamic management

Event Date: Wednesday, April 24, 1 pm US EDT/10 am US PDT/5 pm UTC

Presented by: Heather Welch of NOAA and the University of California Santa Cruz

Description: Spatial management is a useful strategy to regulate human activities and provide protection for vulnerable species and habitats. Dynamic management - a subset of spatial management in which boundaries are flexible in space and/or time - is gaining traction as one solution for managing features with variable distributions, for example highly migratory species. This webinar introduces four applied dynamic management tools: 1) a thermal indicator designed to mitigate loggerhead turtle bycatch, 2) the fisheries sustainability tool - EcoCast, 3) WhaleWatch, designed to reduce ship strike risk to blue whales, and 4) the Atlantic Sturgeon Risk Model. These tools allow scales of management to align with scales of environmental variability, animal movement, and human activities. Next steps to advance the field of dynamic management will also be discussed.

For more information and to register, click here!

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