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Integrated ecosystem assessments challenge the broader scientific community to move beyond the important task of tallying insults to marine ecosystems to developing quantitative tools that can support the decisions national and regional resource managers must make.

Marine spatial planning (MSP) is often considered as a pragmatic approach to implement an ecosystem based management in order to manage marine space in a sustainable way. This requires the involvement of multiple actors and stakeholders at various governmental and societal levels. Several factors affect how well the integrated management of marine waters will be achieved, such as different governance settings (division of power between central and local governments), economic activities (and related priorities), external drivers, spatial scales, incentives and objectives, varying approaches to legislation and political will. We compared MSP in Belgium, Norway and the US to illustrate how the integration of stakeholders and governmental levels differs among these countries along the factors mentioned above. Horizontal integration (between sectors) is successful in all three countries, achieved through the use of neutral ‘round-table’ meeting places for all actors. Vertical integration between government levels varies, with Belgium and Norway having achieved full integration while the US lacks integration of the legislature due to sharp disagreements among stakeholders and unsuccessful partisan leadership. Success factors include political will and leadership, process transparency and stakeholder participation, and should be considered in all MSP development processes.

This paper proposes institutional innovations to advance a transparent monitoring system for the environmental impacts from mineral development on the deep seabed beyond national jurisdictions managed by the International Seabed Authority (ISA). Using a literature review, ISA’s regulations, and five cases of other environmental monitoring of the deep sea, this study observes that ISA's environmental monitoring system for exploration and exploitation currently lacks critical elements to facilitate transparency. Insufficient compliance reporting and review systems, as well as limited access to information by stakeholders, lower the system's effectiveness. ISA has not developed adequate mechanisms to support effective multinational collaboration in monitoring. The ISA monitoring system without these characteristics may not be sufficiently adaptive to allow detection and management of environmental changes in the deep seabed. This study suggests 15 institutional recommendations to ISA in order to enhance transparency for monitoring nodule mining in the Central Pacific deep seabed. Principal recommendations include establishing compliance review committees independent of ISA governing bodies, implementing collective monitoring and reporting by adjacent contractors, and reconsidering the centralized decision-making authority by the Secretary-General to improve confidentiality.

We discuss 12 misperceptions, misstatements, or mistakes concerning the use of covariates in observational or nonrandomized research. Additionally, we offer advice to help investigators, editors, reviewers, and readers make more informed decisions about conducting and interpreting research where the influence of covariates may be at issue. We primarily address misperceptions in the context of statistical management of the covariates through various forms of modeling, although we also emphasize design and model or variable selection. Other approaches to addressing the effects of covariates, including matching, have logical extensions from what we discuss here but are not dwelled upon heavily. The misperceptions, misstatements, or mistakes we discuss include accurate representation of covariates, effects of measurement error, overreliance on covariate categorization, underestimation of power loss when controlling for covariates, misinterpretation of significance in statistical models, and misconceptions about confounding variables, selecting on a collider, and p value interpretations in covariate-inclusive analyses. This condensed overview serves to correct common errors and improve research quality in general and in nutrition research specifically.

Fishery scientists and managers and the general public are becoming increasingly aware of, and concerned about, the direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts of habitat change on commercial and recreational fisheries, and the effects of these fisheries in an ecosystem context. This set of concerns is coupled with declines in some fish stocks due to mismanagement, such as overfishing, failure to account for bycatch, or gear damage to habitats, and/or changing environmental conditions. At the same time, there are examples of management decisions and habitat restoration efforts that have led to the recovery of depleted stocks and habitats. All of this is happening in the context of new concerns about marine biodiversity, marine reserves, and application of the Endangered Species Act to marine species (e.g., salmonids with extensive riverine, and ocean habitat needs). The Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA), passed by Congress in September 1996, and signed by President Clinton 11 October 1996, is a wake-up call that mandates, as federal policy, that fishery management move toward better incorporation of information on fish habitats and use of ecosystem approaches in management decisions. Currently, fishery managers in the National Marine Fisheries Service and the eight regional councils are in the process of adapting to these new directions. Habitat-oriented and ecosystem-based approaches offer potential solutions to some of the management problems, but they are not panaceas. Ecosystem approaches carry institutional requirements that demand major changes in research and training and require support from the user communities and the public. Ecologically sustainable fisheries are undoubtedly much different fisheries from many of those now observed. Actions to implement the SFA portend significant progress toward more sustainable fisheries and healthier ecosystems. However, major gaps exist in understanding how to manage the transition from current fishery practices to ecologically sustainable ones, and significant increases in human and fiscal resources are necessary to overcome these gaps.

Monitoring. Because there are diverse governmental, nongovernmental, and academic institutions in the Puget Sound region, a number of ongoing monitoring efforts exist in the region (e.g., http://wdfw.wa.gov/fish/psamp/). [...]researchers and policy makers find themselves drowning in data while gasping for knowledge of how ecosystems respond to human activities [44].

Marine spatial planning (MSP) is often considered as a pragmatic approach to implement an ecosystem based management in order to manage marine space in a sustainable way. This requires the involvement of multiple actors and stakeholders at various governmental and societal levels. Several factors affect how well the integrated management of marine waters will be achieved, such as different governance settings (division of power between central and local governments), economic activities (and related priorities), external drivers, spatial scales, incentives and objectives, varying approaches to legislation and political will. We compared MSP in Belgium, Norway and the US to illustrate how the integration of stakeholders and governmental levels differs among these countries along the factors mentioned above. Horizontal integration (between sectors) is successful in all three countries, achieved through the use of neutral 'round-table' meeting places for all actors. Vertical integration between government levels varies, with Belgium and Norway having achieved full integration while the US lacks integration of the legislature due to sharp disagreements among stakeholders and unsuccessful partisan leadership. Success factors include political will and leadership, process transparency and stakeholder participation, and should be considered in all MSP development processes.