Marine Recovery - What is a marine recovery plan & how does it help?

Hello everyone! We are two Memorial university students from St. John’s, Newfoundland and we are first time bloggers who are completing this blog and several others to follow as part of our conservation biology class. Our number one priority is to spark the interest of the public and inform readers of marine conservation recovery plans; a distant and less important objective is of course, to get a good a grade. So your first question may be what exactly is a marine recovery plan?

Marine Recovery Planning is the process where an endangered or threatened organism is identified and an action plan is produced to ensure both the survival and the recovery of a species to self-sustainable levels.

Recovery Plans have two main objectives:

1.      To help a species survive and;

2.      To help a population recover.

A recovery plan is capable of producing such an effect by helping to produce more individuals of a species while reducing or removing threats, such as predators or anthropogenic effects. Recovery planning is usually achieved by following two steps: development of a strategy and development of an action plan.

            We will be discussing this topic in the hope to show how important it really is to maintain and help conserve our marine resources. With a long history for whaling, continuous over fishing, pollution, and global warming, our ocean’s organisms in general are in great danger. In Newfoundland, we are perhaps more educated on this topic then most cultures. The cod fishery was one of our greatest natural resources, however it is now by some considered commercially extinct.

In the upcoming 8 weeks, we will be posting blogs on endangered marine organisms (eg. right whale) currently involved or in need of a recovery plan within Newfoundland when compared with other parts of the world.

Thanks for reading!
Kyle and Shannon

References:

Foin, T., Riley, S., Pawley, A., Ayres, D., Carlsen, T., Hodum, P., & Switzer, P. (1998). Improving Recovery Planning for Threatened and Endangered Species. BioScience. 48(3): 177-184.

Government of British Columbia: Ministry of Environment Ecosystems Branch. (2011). Retrieved from: http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/wld/recoveryplans/rcvry1.htm on February 7, 2012.