A couple of weeks ago, I started this series with a discussion of how we value our oceans and why it is important to try to quantify these values so that we can adequately protect them as we plan for the future. I followed that with a discussion of the types of planning efforts that are taking place on a broad scale and how those are helping to inform decisions about what happens where. These are the regional ocean planning efforts that are happening around the country, including the Northeast.

While I had planned on taking things down to the local level this week, it occurred to me that I skipped a step, which is to talk about how states manage their resources. Next week, I promise I’ll get down to the local scale.

Picture Google Earth, as you did last week, but this time start by looking at the entire Northeast region from Maine down to Connecticut. If you look out beyond the green out into the water, you will notice a broad light blue area.

This area is wide at the top and then narrows down past Cape Cod. You might notice a faint thumbprint shape reaching up into the Gulf of Maine. That’s Georges Bank, an area of shallower water renowned for fishing because of the mixing of the waters on top with the deeper waters at its edge.

This light blue area is the continental shelf, a broad swath of ocean floor adjacent to our coast where the majority of our coastal economic activity occurs. Out past its edge, things drop off quickly to dramatic depths.

Of course, shipping traverses this area and other industries and uses exist there as well, but the majority of overlapping uses are in the waters nearer to shore. That is a quick overview of the Northeast region — one of nine regions of the United States working on ocean plans.

There are many things beyond a shared planning effort that tie this region together. The ocean is fluid. So the things that are in it, both living and not, move around quite a bit, some by themselves and some along with the movement of the water they live in.

There are the obvious migratory species that travel up and down the coast at different times of year. There are non-migratory fish whose geographic ranges can vary from year to year. And there are nutrients that move through currents along it.

In addition, many of these dynamics are shifting as the waters warm. We are seeing species in Maine that were once much more common in Rhode Island. The other thing these states share is some of the same agencies managing their resources such as the Northeast Fishery Management Council (NEFMC), which manages fisheries across the states. The NEFMC considers the entirety of a species’ range when making decisions about how much fishing will be allowed and using what methods.

But, as you can imagine, there are some major differences between the coastal waters of Connecticut versus those of Maine. The most obvious difference is temperature. The Gulf Stream sweeps way out along the continental shelf edge here in Maine so that the Gulf of Maine stays cool. In Connecticut, however, it comes much closer, along the edge of the much narrower shelf edge. This brings warmer water to the Connecticut coast.

Water temperature is a major factor determining where all kinds of marine plants and animals can live. Habitat is just one of the other factors in play — Maine has an extensive rocky seafloor that lobsters love to hide in. The seafloor off the coast of Connecticut is flatter by contrast. Then there are the tides, nutrient levels, and many other factors that differentiate the marine environments between the states in the Northeast region.

That brings us to the state level. Each state has the authority to manage many of its own resources. A Department of Marine Resources (DMR) exists for all of the states in the Northeast region. In Maine, it is responsible for the state’s most valuable fishery — the lobster fishery.

There is a degree of local control by the zone councils A-G along the coast. These are composed of lobstermen who vote on specific rules for their zone, but they must comply with the overall limits set by the state.

The state is also responsible for aquaculture below the intertidal zone. Aquaculture is an emerging industry in Maine with potential for much more growth in the future. Much of this is focused on shellfish, primarily oysters, but some growers are also growing hard-shell clams, blue mussels, and several species of seaweed.

The Maine Coastal Program, part of the DMR, focuses on other coastal issues including state-level planning for other uses. They have done some neat mapping of the seafloor off the coast and combined it with other data both about biological resources as well as human uses in a coastal atlas — mainecoastalatlas.org.

The information from this atlas has also been included in the regional plan. The atlas shows distinct differences across the state. Our coastline varies greatly from the sandy wide beaches in Wells to the craggy inlets of Jonesport. Local knowledge and input is needed to make good decisions along the coasts and must come from each of the towns along it. I will save that for the next column — how to participate in this process as a resident of a coastal community and make sure that your values are represented in plans for the future.

Susan Olcott lives in Brunswick, with her husband and 7-year old twin girls. She earned her M.S. in zoology studying the lobster fishery in New England. She then designed education programs for the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and taught biology to military personnel in Sardinia, Italy before returning to Maine to work on ocean planning for The Ocean Conservancy. She is now a freelance writer and currently writes about coastal issues for the Harpswell Anchor and The Working Waterfront and about local foods for the Brunswick Topsham Land Trust and Zest Magazine. In addition, she helps local schools pursue educational grants and writes children’s book reviews for the Horn Book’s family reading blog as well as for her own blog: susanolcott.wordpress.com.