Community volunteer group, Friends of Port Mouton Bay (FPMB), and OceanCanada, a national research organization working to address Canada’s most pressing coastal issues, have launched the Port Mouton Bay Asset Map. This is a major milestone for FPMB as part of the OceanCanada Partnership (OCP), a 6-year Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) initiative (2014-2020).
Photo 1: Port Mouton Bay Asset Map’s main page showing 3 tabs: Our Story, Asset Maps, and Local Research. Photo by Alecia Bowers
This immersive online story map highlights 6 categories of community assets and their vulnerabilities to climate change using spatial data, photos, and on-line links.
A ‘community asset’ is anything a community finds valuable. From a wharf to a fishery, a beach to a business or even skilled labour, community assets make communities strong and resilient.
Photo 2: The Asset Maps tab highlights 6 categories of community assets.
Resilience is required of many community assets to withstand the future impacts from climate change through rising sea levels and erosion, and challenges from mismanaged land-use activities.
This Story Map explores these assets and provides interactive knowledge exchange for protecting their future. You’ll discover this UNESCO Biosphere Reserve area and its coastal ecosystems, understanding the area’s biggest threats, exploring adaptation measures and ways forward.
The Community Asset Map also offers visual and digestible, plain language versions of local scientific papers, recently published in the following journals: Marine Ecology Progress Series; Marine Pollution Bulletin; Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science; and PeerJ.
Photo 3. The Local Research tab highlights 4 plain-language versions of recently published local works.
The Community Asset Map also highlights results from a community-workshop, where attendees recorded local climate change observations onto a map, later digitized into the interactive map points shown under the ‘Our Story’ tab and ‘Climate Change’ bookmark.
Photo 4: Impacts of local climate change shown as interactive dots under the Our Story tab and ‘Climate Change’ bookmark.
Robert Ross, MCIP, a local resident of Port Mouton, had this to say after viewing the story map:
“Overall the Story Map format is an innovative, very high quality, visible representation of the Port Mouton Bay community, and of its character, its assets, challenges and opportunities.”
The Port Mouton Bay Asset Map is available at:
For more information on FPMB visit: http://www.friendsofportmoutonbay.ca/
For more on the OCP visit: https://www.oceancanada.org/
Contact Lydia Ross
(902)-476-7827 text /phone
Lydia.leone.ross@gmail.com