Five years later: the Ocean SAMP

April 6, 2016, NARRAGANSETT – Five years after the adoption of the nation’s first ocean spatial planning effort – the Rhode Island Ocean Special Area Management Plan – there is much to celebrate, and still more work to be done.

The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC), along with the University of Rhode Island Coastal Resources Center and R.I. Sea Grant, hosted a celebratory stakeholder meeting on March 29, inviting all of those who took part in the SAMP’s development and stakeholder process, as well as interested members of the public, to return for research updates and to learn what the future holds.

“There were skeptics,” said Ken Payne, moderator for the SAMP. “Everyone was a true stakeholder. Things are happening in Rhode Island because we had that process. The planning effort that was mounted – ocean spatial planning – has produced results that collectively, Rhode Island can be proud of.”

Jennifer McCann of CRC, and Ocean SAMP co-leader, told those in attendance that she and CRMC Executive Director Grover Fugate had travelled the world, by invitation, talking to people about the SAMP, and a common advantage that this plan had over any other was its stakeholder process.

In response to people asking why the state would want to get involved in marine spatial planning, Fugate said, “It comes down to, who do you want to control your destiny?” The CRMC and its partners took an active role in determining what would be protected, the science used in the process, and where development should go, rather than reacting to proposals.

One very tangible result of the SAMP process has been the ongoing construction of the Block Island Wind Farm, the first offshore wind farm in the United States. Aileen Kenney, vice president of permitting and environmental affairs, provided updates on the construction. The five jackets have been installed, and installation of the towers (being assembled at ProvPort) will be taking place this summer. The process of laying cable is progressing at both Scarborough Beach in Narragansett and on Block Island. The turbines, now being built by GE, are on-schedule to arrive in September. Blount Boats built a special offshore service vessel – to be operated by RI Fast Ferry – which will pull up against the jacket foundation to allow crews to disembark safely. Kenney said she expects wind turbine installation to take 30 days for each, with commissioning in late 2016.

“With all of the planning that was done, I don’t think that without it, we would have this project,” she said of the Ocean SAMP effort. “We’d be in court right now, and we certainly wouldn’t be on the schedule that we’re on.”

Dr. Peter Paton discussed his work within the SAMP area to understand certain chief species’ (such as the common loon, and ducks like scoters) use of it, and provided updates on ongoing avian studies. His initial work showed that these birds prefer waters less than 20 meters deep for habitat, which led to the decision during the SAMP process to prohibit projects in those shallow, close to shore waters. Paton has continued to monitor how birds are using the SAMP area, and reported that common loons use Rhode Island coastal waters, in large numbers, for wintering. Piping plovers, a protected species, breed in coastal areas in late spring into summer before flying south for the winter.

There is a healthy offshore lobster population in Rhode Island waters, according to URI’s Dr. Jeremy Collie, a fish researcher who studied the potential impacts of wind energy development on lobsters in the Area of Mutual Interest (offshore renewable energy lease blocks located in federal waters off RI). Prior to the SAMP, this was unknown, he said, because offshore waters are not captured in trawl surveys. This work establishes pre-construction conditions, Collie said, and monitoring will continue and post-construction research will assess possible impacts from the wind farm.

Dr. John King, an oceanography professor at URI, discussed the efforts to identify now-submerged archaeological evidence of Native American life on the Continental Shelf. According to the Narragansett Tribe’s oral history, their people lived on the shelf until rapidly melting glaciers forced their retreat inland. A large part of working with the Tribe during the SAMP process, King said, was creating trust – that the SAMP’s aim is to respect Tribe history and to catalog and protect these submerged sites. King reported that the team has found sites beneath peat layers, which preserved artifacts. So far, evidence of these communities has been discovered in Greenwich Bay and off Block Island. King said there would be a training course/workshop this summer (June) on topics of Tribal and scientific concern, to continue to relationship between the Tribe and researches, government officials and other partners.

The CRMC and URI are also currently working on updating the Recreation and Tourism chapter of the SAMP, to reflect the newest industry information. For example, since the Ocean SAMP’s adoption, coastal tourism annual spending has increased 6.25 percent, and cruise passenger spending is up 22.46 percent. And new uses to be added to the chapter include spearfishing, kitesurfing, and stand up paddleboarding, as well as 20 new dive sites. There have been a number of public stakeholder meetings to get input on these updates, and proposed changes to the chapter will be publicly vetted and adopted by the CRMC before becoming effective.

Another direct result of the success of the Ocean SAMP has been the development of a Northeast Ocean Plan. Betsy Nicholson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and plan co-lead, said one of the goals of the regional ocean plan was to improve synergy between the states, and to better understand and collect information about the region’s coastal resources. Fugate is the other co-lead for this effort. A comprehensive database online of “marine life-based products” will be available in early May in draft form, Nicholson said. The regional plan is set to be the first in the nation, and will also include data from the Ocean SAMP.

“It’s meant to give us a much better idea, regionally, of what’s going on in the water and on the water,” she said. “It’s context. This helps identify potential conflicts and compatibility, employ bets practices for regulatory and management processes through agency coordination, stakeholder engagement, and use of data. It makes New England a priority for science and funding.”

Fugate also announced at the stakeholder meeting his plan to begin work on a “Bay SAMP” in the future, which will look at closing data gaps in Narragansett Bay waters, using the same approach as the Ocean SAMP and Rhode Island’s ocean waters.

“As we began to collect data inside the Bay [for the update and regional plan, we realized] there are a lot of uses that we’d never documented before in this context,” Fugate said. “The Ocean SAMP is very protective of those uses offshore, but we have no complement in the Rhode Island coastal program. We are now looking at extending this to the Bay and inside. We need to start bringing the same level of protection to our Bay.”