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There were 25 -30 attendees this morning at the Coastal Zone Management Authority and Institute Geospatial workshop. They will spend the next three days learning how to use a new application that was developed to assist them in the process of Marine Spatial Planning. Samir Rosado, the Plan Process Lead for CZMAI, described it as a tool to be used in developing the Belize sustainable Ocean plan.

Samir Rosado, Marine Spatial Plan Process Lead, CZMAI
"That plan is the marine spatial plan tied to the Blue bond agreement which is supposed to look at our entire ocean space, give stakeholders an opportunity for us to sit down, analyse, rationalise and go about allocating space that would support activities that happen within our ocean space as we term it but Belize's seas and waters that are integral to communities, that are integral for our economy and ensure that we get it right through this process."

"So we are taking a look at two of the main decision support tools that we are utilising for the process namely Marxan and Seasketch. Now as you can imagine a process that is looking to allocate space to support activity will take a lot of data inputs. You have information that has to come from the public at large you know, real users of the space you also have information that has to come from government, from managers and so we have to find a way to bring all of this together in a way that makes sense and be in a position to be able to use it to make decisions. Sea sketch is that tool that we utilise to actually collect data so we have done two rounds of survey implementation where we went to 26 communities across Belize and we found out from all of the community members exactly what spaces they need on a day to day basis, if you are a fisher, where are the areas that are important to you, tour guide you know even if it is just for recreational use we went about figuring our where those areas are so that as we go about planning and actually rationalising the use of space we know exactly where things occur and then we work our hardest to not displace or disenfranchise people that utilise those spaces. Marxan on the other hand is a tool that helps us to really hone in on the areas that would be candidate sites for the designation of biodiversity protection zones so tied to this Belize sustainable Ocean plan there is a target to designate up to 30% of our ocean space as a biodiversity protection zone. But in doing so we need to ensure we are ticking all the boxes and meeting certain criteria's."

The application has been in use within Belize for just under a year. Their senior fellow reported that they have experienced major success in other countries like Portugal and hopes this valuable tool can do the same for Belize

Will McClintock, Senior Fellow, SeaSketch
"My lab at the University of California Santa Barbra develops an application called Sea Sketch which is being used here and actually all over the world for Marine Spatial planning including the design of Marine Protected areas and at this workshop we are helping people learn how to use Sea Sketch for collaboratively designing and evaluating Biodiversity protection zones to meet certain science and policy guidelines, so for example to protect 30% of the Ocean space and all the key Eco systems in there and I will minimise the displacement of users of that ocean space so users here will see how that tool interacts with other tools such as Marxan which is a prioritisation tool, sort of a modelling tool so you can imagine that planning ocean space requires the input of people's values and ideas generated by people for what areas should be protected, SeaSketch is a tool that captures people's ideas or values and lets people express their ideas and collaborate with others to design those protected areas. Marxan is a tool that really allows for people to input their objectives and then have the computer generate ideas for what areas should be protected. So these two tools Seasketch and Marxan are used together to combine people's ideas and then computer generated ideas to identify places for protection."

"So SeaSketch has actually been used over the last year here in Belize to gather values in the sense that it was used in a survey asking people to identify places they value in the ocean for fishing, diving, transportation, recreation and so on and the feedback we have gotten in that case is wow seasketch is a very simple tool to use and it's an effective means of gathering and then inputting people's values into the planning process."

"It's a little early to tell but from today's workshop I can see that a number of people have already used seasketch which is a good sign because I haven't taught anyone how to use seasketch yet so people have gotten online at sketch.org/belize to see the tool and experiment with it and that is kind of the message for everybody in Belize if you have a computer and the internet connection you can go to Seasketch.org/Belize and see all the data being used in this planning process and experiment with the tools that are used to design these biodiversity protection zones."