Making Data Digestible: The Creation of a West Coast Ocean Health Scorecard

The West Coast Ocean Alliance (WCOA) focuses on facilitating discussion between state, tribal and federal ocean and coastal decision-makers, while the West Coast Ocean Data Portal (WCODP) focuses on supplying relevant data to support that discussion. However, there often exists a gap between the collection and presentation of large data sets and how valuably they can inform management decisions. Driven by the request of West Coast ocean managers for a condensed set of ocean health indicators that can convey meaningful trends, WCODP has endeavored to create a West Coast ocean health scorecard. This scorecard is emblematic of how WCOA and WCODP complement one another, and this presentation will describe the conception of the scorecard, the method used for its creation, and its preliminary model. Additionally, this presentation will describe some of the gaps that need to be addressed in order for the scorecard to come to fruition, so that it may provide insight for cooperative management decisions.