Abstract :
Over the last 50 years, national, international and private stewardship and conservation organizations have spent billions of dollars collecting marine ecosystem information. This remains divided among many custodians, scattered among thousands of published sources and, from a global perspective, is fragmentary in nature. It is argued that new resource management questions regarding coastal ecosystem health can be addressed through the recovery and ‘data miningʹ of this previously collected and often discarded information. A retrospective marine epidemiological approach was developed to demonstrate that marine morbidity, mortality, and disease information is recoverable by keyword searching of academic journals and through the retrieval of publicly available digital and print-media information. Observational records compiled from disturbances occurring within the Northwestern Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea confirm that anomalous marine morbidity and mortality events have increased in number and frequency during the last 30 years. A global approach is summarized for systematically reconstructing spatial and temporal disturbance indicator time series using data mining and data reduction techniques.
