Under the leadership of the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara, and with help from Ecotrust, and The Nature Conservancy, MarineMap was introduced to facilitate the design and evaluation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) as defined by California’s Marine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI). This collaboration brought together skills that included open-source software development, marine science data management, analysis and visualization, local knowledge data collection, social and economic analysis, as well as stakeholder engagement and conservation planning.