The emergence of dynamic management approaches in ocean ecosystems with a comparison to management of terrestrial ecosystems

Dynamic Ocean Management is an emerging approach that recognizes that the marine ecosystems change over time in three dimensions and that organisms, including people, respond to these dynamics. Most current management approaches to interactions with pelagic organisms are static. New modeling techniques allow us to integrate real time data on ocean dynamics with animal movement data to predict animal movements at a variety of scales and to enhance our understanding as to what likely drives these movements. Here we show a variety of applications to reducing bycatch of charismatic megafauna in fisheries and to reducing ship strikes of cetaceans. We formally compare Dynamic Ocean Management to similar approaches in terrestrial ecosystems. Projections can be made in near real time to decades in the future, allowing us to understand and manage species to ecosystems, to assess the potential for mobile protected areas, and the responses to protected species to climate change.