The Marine Ecosystem Services Partnership (MESP) is a collaborative effort to develop and maintain a “virtual center” to better integrate our expanding library of economic valuations of marine ecosystems with marine policy needs. Guided by its working partners, project staff at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and Duke’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Laboratory are directing an organized online effort to make literature and spatial data pertaining to marine economic valuations freely available.
The virtual center will also host an active, facilitated community of practice to 1) link users and producers of economic valuation data, 2) to help better interpret and use the data, and 3) communicate with researchers, helping to ensure that new valuation efforts better meet the needs of data users. The long-term objective is to make new valuation estimates readily available to the public through user communication and data entry portal. The MESP strives to serve policy makers, environmental managers, researchers, and marine ecosystem stakeholders.
The MESP's working partners and data managers met for the first time in early 2011 to identify an optimal direction to reach the technical and organizational goals of the partnership. The MESP launched the beta version of its website (www.marineecosystemservices.org) in May 2011, offering a dynamic mapping tool that spatially represents the MESP database of over 2,000 values of economic valuation data. The mapping tool allows users to burrow down through different types of data through spatial and thematic searches.