Marine Sensitivity

Project Documentation

Authors

Affiliations

Benjamin D. Best

Ocean Metrics LLC

Timothy P. White

BOEM’s Office of Environmental Programs

Published

2026-08-20

Preface

The Marine Sensitivity Toolkit (MST) is a cloud-native system developed for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to assess the sensitivity of marine ecosystems to offshore energy development.

It integrates 16,153 species distribution models with extinction risk assessments across US waters (9,230 of which fall within the 20 BOEM Program Areas of the current program cycle).

What changed in v7, relative to v6

Validity decoupled from Program Areas

Methods — Scores are recomputed over the full set, with negligible effect: 18 of 20 Program Areas are unchanged.

Reported units — Scores are reported on the 20 Program Areas. A single subregion also carries a composite score, which is a by-product of the study-area rollup rather than a reporting unit. (measured: 20 programarea, 1 subregion scored on the composite metric.)

Scope — Validity is decoupled from Program Areas. Earlier releases silently required a species to overlap a current Program Area to count as valid, which hid biodiversity outside the program cycle’s footprint. Validity now means a taxonomically valid species with a modeled distribution anywhere in the study area, and Program-Area membership becomes a spatial query answered afterwards. The count rises sharply without a single species being added.

Measured against v6: valid species 9,424 → 16,153; spatial units changed.

Figure 1: Overview of the MST methodology: species distribution models from the source datasets are merged, weighted by extinction risk scores (incorporating ESA, MMPA, MBTA, and IUCN protections), rescaled by ecoregion, and aggregated to management zones for visualization.

Interactive Apps

Composite scores — sensitivity scores by zone, with flower-plot summaries
Individual species — individual species distribution models and habitat suitability

Both render any published release: append ?ver=v3 (or any version) to view that one.

Scoring walkthrough — step through the scoring pipeline interactively, from input rasters to final scores

Documentation

This book documents the scientific methodology, software infrastructure, and interactive applications that comprise the MST. It is organized in two parts:

4 Science — data sources, taxonomic integration, extinction risk scoring, model merging, and sensitivity scoring methodology
12 Software — server architecture, databases, workflows, APIs, R libraries, and interactive applications

How to Cite

Best, B.D., T.P. White (2026). Marine Sensitivity Toolkit: Project Documentation. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Environmental Studies Program. https://marinesensitivity.org/docs/

Acknowledgments

This work is funded by the BOEM Environmental Studies Program (BOEM-ESP). We thank the data providers whose open datasets make this work possible: AquaMaps, BirdLife International, IUCN Red List, NOAA Fisheries, and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.