The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS) is a federally protected marine area offshore of California's Big Sur and central coast in the United States. It is the largest US national marine sanctuary and has a shoreline length of 276 mi stretching from just north of the Golden Gate Bridge at San Francisco to Cambria in San Luis Obispo County. Supporting one of the world's most diverse marine ecosystems, it is home to numerous mammals, seabirds, fishes, invertebrates and plants in a remarkably productive coastal environment. The MBNMS was established on September 18, 1992, for the purpose of resource protection, research, education, and public use.

Description

The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS) is one of the largest of a system of 14 National Marine Sanctuaries administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), within the U.S. Department of Commerce. It stretches from Rocky Point in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, to the town of Cambria in San Luis Obispo County, and encompasses a shoreline length of 276 mi and 6094 sqmi of ocean surrounding Monterey Bay. Its seaward boundary is an average of 30 mi offshore, and shoreward boundary the mean high tide. Its area is 6,094 sqmi. The deepest point is 10,663 ft in the Monterey Submarine Canyon, which is deeper than the Grand Canyon. The average ocean surface temperature is 55 °F. The sanctuary provides habitat for 36 species of marine mammals, 94 species of seabirds, at least 525 species of fish, four of sea turtles, 31 phyla of marine invertebrates, and more than 450 species of marine algae. Historical sites include 1,276 reported shipwrecks and 718 prehistoric sites. The MBNMS has major programs for research and monitoring, and another for education and outreach. Public recreation activities such as kayaking, scuba diving, and surfing are permitted, along with commercial fishing. Offshore oil drilling and seabed mining are banned to protect the sanctuary. The sanctuary provides economic value via ecotourism as well as fishery resources, including the Dungeness crab and market squid. Otter trawling has been shown to have a significantly negative impact on the benthic invertebrate biodiversity in areas where trawling is less restricted. Despite its protection as a National Marine Sanctuary MPA, a study found microplastic concentrations were higher than the global average, with a higher amount closer to shore.

Visitor centers

A Coastal Discovery Center is located across California State Route 1 (the Pacific Coast Highway) from the Hearst Castle visitor center in San Simeon, California, near the William Randolph Hearst Memorial State Beach. The Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary Exploration Center opened on July 23, 2012 at 35 Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, California.

Collaborations

MBNMS collaborations include:

Events and activities

A Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary event calendar lists meetings as well as volunteer events such as Snapshot Day, Urban Watch, First Flush (water quality monitoring programs), and TeamOCEAN (kayaker naturalist program). The organization launched the Sanctuary Integrated Monitoring Network (SIMoN) website in 2003 to collect metadata for its various monitoring projects. In 2012, this information was released as an iOS application to allow visitors better access to the over 4,200 photos that have been collected.

History

A Marine Sanctuaries Study Bill was first proposed in 1967 with lobbying efforts by the Sierra Club. The Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act of 1972 authorized the United States Environmental Protection Agency to monitor off-shore dumping. In 1975, the California Coastal Zone Conservation Commission recommended a marine sanctuary and in 1976 Santa Cruz County and Monterey County joined the lobbying effort. In 1983 the Ronald Reagan administration dropped the area from consideration as a sanctuary. In 1988 the United States Congress re-authorized the Sanctuaries Act and proposed a sanctuary in Monterey Bay. However, public hearings, with the memory of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, brought protests demanding a larger size. The first draft environmental impact statement was released in 1990, and a final management plan in June 1992 proposing the extended area. NOAA states both that it designated the sanctuary on September 18, 1992, and also that on September 20, 1992, legislation proposed by U.S. Representative Leon Panetta authorized the sanctuary. At the time, it was the largest federal marine sanctuary in the continental United States.

Management

There have been five superintendents of the MBNMS since its inception:

Management of northern section

Since the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary (GFNMS) had been established earlier and had a staff already, the section of MBNMS north of Año Nuevo Point near the San Mateo County line was managed by GFNMS from its office in San Francisco. By 1996, Terry Jackson of MBNMS requested that the management boundaries be adjusted to match the sanctuary boundaries. However, Ed Ueber of GFNMS opposed any change.

Oil and gas reserves

There are oil and gas reserves off the coast, but exploration has not been permitted. In 1982, United States Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt proposed opening the outer continental shelf off the Central Coast of California to oil and gas exploration. California residents and politicians strongly opposed the proposal and it was defeated. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush used an obscure 1953 law to permanently ban oil and gas development in Monterey Bay. In late December 2016, President Barack Obama used the same law to ban oil exploration from Hearst Castle to Point Arena in Mendocino County, California. In July 2017, under the direction of Executive Order 13795 from President Donald Trump, the United States Department of Commerce began re-evaluating the protected status of the sanctuary, which includes the Davidson Seamount off the coast of Big Sur. The seamount, at 23 nmi long, 7 nmi wide, and 7480 ft high, is one of the largest in the world. Many environmentalists and residents opposed opening the area to oil and gas exploration.

Related protection areas

A large number of protected areas have overlapping jurisdictions. From roughly from north to south:

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