Wind to Whales Project

Both human populations and marine resources are concentrated in the coastal zones of the UnitedStates. With increasing human populations, demands on coastal resources are increasing, leading to unprecedented changes in coastal ecosystems. Because we rely on the ocean for food, mineral resources, and recreation, it is critical that we develop conservation and management strategies that facilitate the sustainable use of marine resources while minimizing impacts on natural systems. Unfortunately, a lack of understanding of the basic processes governing coastal ocean ecosystems has been a major impediment to conserving marine ecosystems.

A comprehensive understanding of how physical ocean dynamics affect marine resources has not been realized due 3 main limitations: 1) the development of new technologies to measure key components in the system, 2) the integration of diverse data sets across disciplines and programs, and 3) incompatibilities in temporal and spatial resolution of data sets. Recent technological breakthroughs in numerous disciplines have made possible new syntheses that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. A well-integrated interdisciplinary approach offers the only prospect of truly providing predictions regarding present and future effects of human activities on marine ecosystems. We have assembled a group of physical oceanographers, geochemists, biological oceanographers, ecologists, resources managers, and remote sensing, instrumentation and networking engineers that are working synergistically to develop an integrated technological approach to overcome these limitations and provide novel insights and critical data about the functioning of California coastal upwelling ecosystem.

The Wind to Whales research project links new technologies across disciplines of marine science to address key questions for marine resource managers – from physical forcing to fisheries and protected resources. The goal of this project is to develop an innovative new approach to understanding how key marine resources – fisheries, seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals –respond to short and long-term changes in physical oceanographic processes such as El Niño events, decadal oscillations, and long-term climate change. Such a comprehensive, integrated, interdisciplinary approach has been identified as the best approach to an integrated ocean observing system.

GENERAL PROJECT GOALS

The Wind to Whales project, through the Center for Integrated Marine Technologies (http://cimt.ucsc.edu/siteNew/), combines emerging technological and data integration approaches to determine of the processes underlying the dynamics of the coastal upwelling ecosystems along the California coast.

Specifically, we are using using these technologies to investigate the critical linkages between:

· the physical processes of coastal upwelling that directly impact

· macro and micro nutrient delivery that results in

· spatial and temporal variability in primary production and phytoplankton blooms (including harmful algal blooms) that ultimately determine

· the distribution, abundance, and productivity of organisms at higher trophic levels including squid, fishes, seabirds, sea turtles, pinnipeds, and whales

This comprehensive interdisciplinary approach will serve as a model for an integrated coastal ocean observation system and establish the scientific basis for the effective monitoring