Sandwiched between the Greater Farallones and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries is a 101-square-mile expanse of unprotected water that runs from outside the Golden Gate Bridge south to Pacifica. This fall, members of the Greater Farallones advisory council plan to outline recommendations for how the area could receive sanctuary protections. The marine environment near the mouth of the bridge is unique, governed by a mixing of estuary and salty ocean water and strong upwelling patterns, while the entire zone under consideration provides important habitat for a range of endangered and threatened species, including brown pelicans, humpback whales and sea turtles. The area was excluded from the boundaries of the Monterey Bay sanctuary when the latter was established in 1992 due to a host of concerns, including water quality off San Francisco and shipping lanes and speeds. Now, members of the advisory council say those issues have been tackled and it may be possible to afford the waters stricter regulations for the benefit of marine life. “At the time, we said someday we will come back and close that up,” Richard Charter, a longtime advocate and senior fellow with the Ocean Foundation, said of the establishment of the Monterey Bay sanctuary. “It took all these intervening years, and for the City of San Francisco to upgrade so [those issues are] no longer a problem.” Not long after the Monterey Bay sanctuary was established, San Francisco revamped its wastewater treatment capabilities at an oceanside treatment plant, which had been known to release partially treated wastewater into the ocean when it was overwhelmed during a storm. Greater Farallones has worked with the shipping industry in recent years to adjust the northbound routes leading out of the city away from known whale migratory passages. Dr. Dominique Richard, an Inverness resident and the chair of the advisory council and the subcommittee that will explore the future of the zone, said the area could be included in either sanctuary, or become a small independent sanctuary of its own. “The one thing that we know about the exclusion zone and the reason why it was excluded is that those reasons were mitigated. What we are looking at right now is the possibility for how we include it as sanctuary,” Dr. Richard said. The idea came to the forefront last December with the encouragement of Joe Fitting, the deputy director of the San Francisco Zoo, who envisioned a marine interpretive center near Ocean Beach. The subcommittee will present its recommendation for the possible expansion at a meeting on Nov. 19. The council will then decide whether to forward the recommendation to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Marine Sanctuaries, which, in turn, will make a decision regarding next steps.