{"thcode":23,"term":{"code":39,"name":"Ocean Uses","parent":6,"scope":"Data about human activities that occur in, on, under, or immediately above the water in the Nation's coastal and marine environments. Humans use and engage with the oceans in a variety of ways and purposes. To provide an objective, transparent, and consistent means of describing, understanding, and planning for those diverse activities, NOAA's National Marine Protected Areas Center recently published A Common Language of Ocean Uses (Wahle and Townsend, 2013). This simple framework defines 35 distinct ways that people use the oceans in the United States. The framework describes each use from a functional perspective, articulating in objective terms how and where the use typically operates in ocean space and what components it involves (for example, vessels, gear, and so on). The resulting use categories provide a means for aggregating functionally similar uses (for example, offshore recreational and commercial pelagic fishing), while allowing important distinctions to be made and explored within the categories (for example, uses pursued for commercial as opposed to recreational purposes). These Ocean Use categories are included in this document as a proposed unifying framework for collecting, organizing, managing, and applying data on human uses of the oceans for CMSP and other place-based management efforts. Distributions are maps or other spatial representations of human uses of the ocean across space or over time. Assessments are evaluations of the trends, ecological requirements and impacts, demographics, socioeconomic drivers and benefits, and conflicts and compatibilities of other human uses of the ocean in its present distribution. Predictions are the results of projections of future distributions or implications of human uses of the ocean, including changes in response to human and natural processes, optimal locations, and trade-offs resulting from different management actions. As an organizing tool, these uses are here divided into five groups, or sectors, reflecting commonalities of purpose and approach among similar uses."},"uf":[],"bt":[{"code":6,"name":"Data Content Subjects","parent":1,"scope":"Environmental characteristics and processes as well as human activities that use, rely on, or impact those features."},{"code":1,"name":"Data Categories for Marine Planning","parent":null,"scope":"Categories indicating the breadth of information types required for ocean planning from a national, multidisciplinary perspective. Published in USGS Open-File Report 2015-1046, doi:10.3133\/ofr20151046"}],"nt":[{"code":61,"name":"Energy Production","parent":39,"scope":"In addition to the extraction of fossil fuels for energy, new uses are emerging from sources of renewable energy such as wind, waves, tides, and currents. All are industrial, commercial operations and involve relatively large and extensive fixed, installed infrastructure and associated devices for collecting and transmitting the resulting products to shore (for example, pipelines and cables)."},{"code":51,"name":"Harvesting Living Resources","parent":39,"scope":"Many ocean uses revolve around fishing, harvesting, or hunting of animals and plants for either commercial or recreational purposes. In those cases, data can be tagged with the appropriate descriptor (Commercial or Recreational) to allow more refined searches, such as Recreational Pelagic Fishing or Commercial Fishing with Benthic Mobile Gear. Many of these uses involve vessels and specialized capture or harvesting gear."},{"code":72,"name":"Other Commercial\/Industrial Uses","parent":39,"scope":"The oceans of the United States are increasingly considered valuable areas for industrial and commercial operations ranging from mining to aquaculture. These uses typically involve heavy equipment and permanently installed infrastructure, commonly over an extensive spatial footprint."},{"code":40,"name":"Recreational Nonextractive \/Cultural Use","parent":39,"scope":"These are activities pursued by individuals or groups for the purposes of recreation, exercise, sport, cultural traditions, or spiritual renewal. Many involve people in, on, or under the water, often with a small vessel or dive gear. With the exception of Cultural Use, which may include traditional harvest of certain resources by tribes or native peoples, all involve nonextractive activities."},{"code":68,"name":"Transportation","parent":39,"scope":"Among the oldest of human uses of the ocean, the movement of people, goods, and armies by ship remains a major component of the Nation's ocean use footprint. All involve the transit far offshore by large ships over long distances, with periodic passages into shallower waters for loading, offloading, repairs, refueling, and so on."}],"rt":[]}