**5. Conclusion**

The biodiversity of the shallow seabeds of the Strait of Georgia and surrounding regions including Johnstone Strait, Puget Sound and the west coast of Vancouver Island show considerable stability through time. The most obvious biodiversity shifts appear to be in seaweeds in the most recent climate regime, but advances in taxonomic identification suggest that more monitoring effort is required. There are stable and reliable differences, however, in the biodiversity of shallow benthos in the different regions. The Strait of Georgia has a very high biodiversity in comparison to the adjacent inland seas of Johnstone Strait (to the north) and Puget Sound (to the south), but those other two inland seas have subsets of their biodiversity at uniquely high levels of abundance. The present data compilation, together with the more exhaustive records for Strait of Georgia in Lamb et al. (2011) will provide a baseline for comparison to future trends. In all, the news is encouraging that marine biodiversity can demonstrate such resilience in the face of documented fisheries exploitation, climate change and ocean acidification. The present study also serves to demonstrate that it is important to evaluate existing data archives for continuous records of such important aspects of marine biology as species identification and abundance estimates, as well as records of physical seawater quality, such as seawater pH. Models for ecosystem-based management need to minimize the assumptions made and incorporate as much quantified information as possible in order to ensure the greatest possible precision and accuracy of predictions. This work presents descriptive data without any attempt at statistical analyses, in the hope that the obvious data trends can be incorporated into future models. The current academic trend toward producing expertise in quantitative scientific methods needs to be balanced with training of taxonomists for the front line, in order that existing marine biodiversity can be fully monitored now and into the future. The work presented here would not have been produced with any continuity in any existing academic or government biological monitoring programs in this part of the world, and perhaps not anywhere.
