There are obstacles when it comes to sharing marine space, infrastructure, and resources in Rhode Island, a recent study with funding from Rhode Island Sea Grant found.

With the usage of the state’s coastal and offshore waters increasing, University of Rhode Island professor of marine affairs David Bidwell wanted to understand what current and potential marine multi-use opportunities might exist. So, Bidwell, along with Tiffany Smythe, associate professor of maritime governance at the Coast Guard Academy, and Di Jin, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Marine Policy Center, put together focus groups consisting of small-scale business owners from commercial and recreational fisheries, aquaculture, marine educators, and tour boat operators, as well as surfers, kayakers, sailors, and boaters.

What they found, Bidwell said, was that “There wasn’t a lot of clamoring for, ‘Oh, we love multi-use, and here are these opportunities.’ It was mostly this idea of, ‘Well, we deal with multi-use because we have to.’”

The idea that different marine businesses can share space, infrastructure, and resources has been touted as a way to find mutual benefits and reduce use conflicts — like using offshore wind turbines as staging areas for aquaculture farms or infrastructure for environmental data collection.

“Many discussions of ocean multi-use are focused on how offshore wind energy can benefit other users, but we wanted to move beyond that question to understand how small operators are experiencing multi-use more broadly, and to not limit our discussion to offshore wind,” Bidwell told ecoRI News. “You don’t have to look very far around the state to see that commercial fishing, recreational fishing, other forms of recreation like kayaking, and aquaculture are all using the same water. Our focus group participants gave examples of where multi-use has been happening for a long time, like when sailing and recreational fishing are sharing the same space; we call these ‘traditional’ multi-use.” 

The researchers found that lack of parking and other shoreline access issues are an obstacle to multi-use of coastal waters in Rhode Island.

“What we found, particularly with an increase in on-water recreation, is that the demand for that limited supply of access points has just gone sort of sky high. And so there is this real feeling of this need for more multi-use access points and access facilities. If you want to expand multi-use, then having parking, bathrooms, changing rooms, all those sorts of things is really a limiting factor, and we never really thought of that,” Bidwell said.

“For example, if you want to bring tourists or school children out to an aquaculture farm (combining tourism or education with aquaculture), you need a place where participants can park, use a bathroom, and get on and off a boat,” he said. “There are also places that are designated for shoreline fishing, where other users like surfers may not be welcomed with open arms.” 

The researchers found that uses that had a long tradition of sharing space seemed to more or less amicably co-exist — for instance, sailing race organizers coordinated with commercial shippers so they could stay out of each other’s way.

Newer uses, and ones that involved more permanent structures in the water, however, were leading to conflicts, they found.

“When you talk about things like offshore wind or aquaculture, where you have these static uses that are there, that sort of raises these values-based conflicts of ‘What is the marine environment for? Should you be able to basically privatize [marine] areas?’” Bidwell said. “And then when you get lots of new players, there’s more opportunity for conflict.”

Bidwell said some members of the focus groups expressed concerns about the privatization of marinas. “The concern is marinas that focus on one type of user may frown on uses that are viewed as messy or loud. Overall, there was a sense that access to the water is becoming more problematic over time and is increasingly limited to a smaller and smaller subset of users,” he said. 

At this point in their research, Bidwell said, it seems that expanding multi-use marine opportunities in Rhode Island for small businesses is “going to require a real effort from the policy makers to make that actually happen.”

Work on the project will continue into the fall with a second round of focus groups intended to bring the small operators in with other interests, such as larger operators or resource managers, to talk about potential areas of future multi-use.

Some information in this story was originally reported by Rhode Island Sea Grant.