The hypothesis of this project is that information about how the oceans are governed can be gleaned from text analysis of laws and regulations.

The objective of this project is to improve the understanding of existing ocean governance to assist ecosystem-based management initiatives and ocean stakeholders. The project goals include: (1) to compile a database of laws and regulations relevant to the California Current; (2) to develop techniques that quantitatively and objectively provide information about gaps and overlaps in management (using laws and regulations as proxy to represent management); (3) to ground-truth the utility of the techniques and format of results with feedback from government agencies and other ocean stakeholders; (4) disseminate synthesized results in useful format for ocean managers; (5) to make compilation of laws and regulations freely accessible and searchable by the public.