Decision Support Tools for Coastal and Ocean Planning and Management

This chapter addresses the use of decision support tools (DSTs) for marine and coastal planning. DSTs are integrative tools, meaning that they can help achieve a wide range of goals and objectives relevant to planning. Today, myriad software applications facilitate the use of these tools for the marine and coastal environment. This chapter starts with how DSTs contribute to the field of conservation planning and describes three such applications with examples of their use for marine planning. While such tools support environmental planning for oceans and coasts, they do have shortcomings, mentioned herein, and their products are usually the starting points of discussions about planning scenarios and options.