United States (Florida Keys)

A well-known example of marine spatial management as a means to conserve nature is the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) in the southeastern United States.

The FKNMS covers an area of 9,600 km2, stretching about 350 km south and west from the Florida mainland. It was designated as a national marine sanctuary in 1990 under the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Act.

What stimulated spatial planning in the Florida Keys ?

Since the late 1960s, pollution, over-fishing, physical impacts of ship groundings, oil drilling proposals and deteriorating water quality, among others, have been the main drivers to protect the Key’s coral reefs.

The Florida Keys attract three million visitors each year. Similar to the GBRMP, spatial management has been implemented through temporal and geographic zoning to ensure the protection of the FKNMS and its resources and lessen the concentrated impact to marine organisms on heavily used reefs.

The goal of marine spatial management in the Florida Keys is to protect and preserve sensitive components of the ecosystem, to ensure that areas of high ecological importance evolve naturally with minimal human influence, and to allow human uses only where they are consistent with the primary objective of sanctuary resource protection.

Development of spatial planning in the Florida Keys

The FKNMS spatial management system is organized around five types of zones with varying levels of protection, including:

Sanctuary preservation areas (SPAs)	Designed to protect heavily used reefs and biologically important areas where concentrated activity leads to resource degradation
Ecological reserves	Designed to protect biodiversity of large, contiguous and diverse habitats and enhance natural spawning, nursery, and permanent residence and replenishment areas by minimizing human disturbance
Special-use (research only) areas	Established for research and education, or for the recovery or restoration of injured or degraded resources
Wildlife management areas	Established to minimize disturbance to especially sensitive or endangered wildlife and their habitats such as bird nesting, resting, or feeding areas, turtle-nesting beaches
Existing management areas	Designed to represent resource management areas that were established prior to the first Sanctuary Management Plan of 1997

The first FKNMS management plan took six years to develop (1991-96) and was updated in 2005. The effectiveness of the marine zones is evaluated through a sanctuary-wide research and monitoring action plan. In 2002 the International Maritime Organization designated the FKNMS as a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA).

Further information

For further information go to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Website.

Additional reading is also available on the references page of this website.

Last updated: 28 January 2010