CALIFORNIA COOPERATIVE OCEANIC FISHERIES INVESTIGATIONS
TIME-SERIES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PaCOOS
Link to NOAA Strategic Plan: NOAA’s Mission Goal 1: Protect, Restore, and Manage the Use of Coastal and Ocean Resources through Ecosystem-based Management; NOAA Goal 5: Provide Critical Support for NOAA's Mission
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES AND SPECIFIC PLANS TO ACHIEVE THEM
The immediate objective of CalCOFI is to continue the 58-year time-series of physical, chemical and biological observations of the California Current ecosystem, with an emphasis on living marine resources. CalCOFI serves as a cornerstone of the developing Pacific Coast Ocean Observing System (PaCOOS), which will provide scientific information necessary for ecosystem-based management for the living marine resources from Canada to Baja California. The proposed work was to successfully conduct cruises: summer and fall, 2006 and winter and spring 2007; to process the hydrographic, chlorophyll and primary productivity data, exercise quality control and make the data available on the CalCOFI web site.
A second goal is to continue to develop a comprehensive data management plan that will integrate past and future heterogeneous data both within the CalCOFI programs and between CalCOFI and associated programs (especially PaCOOS). CalCOFI also provides a platform for a number of ancillary projects, including marine mammal surveys, and its data provide a vital component of collaborative projects, such as the NSF-funded California Current Ecosystem Long-Term Ecological Research Site project.
RESEARCH ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Our objectives for the 2006-07 year were accomplished. We completed the four routine CalCOFI cruises. Processing is underway on all data. Final published data are on the web for data up to April 2006. Preliminary data are posted for the July cruise.
To facilitate coordination between CalCOFI-SIO and CalCOFI-SWFSC, a variety of joint planning meetings were held to examine data holdings and discuss approaches to bringing data together into a common framework with query and exchange interfaces. Conceptual agreement was reached to designate the Ocean Informatics Information System, DataZoo, as the joint repository and publishing system. This information system was developed under separate funding (PAL LTER, CCE LTER, and Ocean Informatics) to provide data ingestion, storage, access, query and exchange services across multiple projects. Data exchange meets the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard specifications.
CalCOFI-SIO was added as a project to DataZoo this year together with related metadata. Selected datasets were ingested (underway, eventlog, CTD, chlorophyll, weather) to prototype and demonstrate the system to data contributors. The system was designed with an emphasis on data integration implemented through dataset indexing as well as user mapping and filtering. Fifty years of personnel lists have been optically scanned and ingested into a cruise participant database with three interfaces: one that allows for stand alone query, one that supports cruise metadata, and a third that permits ingestion and editing by community participants.
A set of tools was implemented following an enactment model to ensure their usefulness. Work on an ingestion module was given priority in order to allow direct access to the system by data providers rather than adopting the more typical model of sending data to a data management office. In order to improve data flow, an eventlogger was designed and deployed. It is now used routinely at sea, representing an integrative element before data is submitted for ingestion to a data system. In addition, a grid calculator has been developed in both single and batch modes in order to bridge work with intended and calculated station locations, a traditional source of difference between individuals and between laboratories.
Funding from the Ocean Protection Council has been approved to develop fully the metadata and populate the database, integrating the hydrographic data obtained by SIO and ichthyoplankton database developed at the SW Fisheries Science Center (NMFS/NOAA).
The OPC project will also begin to extract the phyllosoma larvae of the California spiny lobster (Panulirus interruptus) from the historical CalCOFI samples. The phyllosoma are in the plankton for about 8 months, and the early phyllosoma stages can potentially be used as an index of spawning stock size and the late stage larvae to predict recruitment to the adult stock. There is a significant fishery for spiny lobster off California, and the project will examine the use of these indices in its management. Relationships of recruitment with climate variability and climate change will also be studied.
There is increasing interest in California to assess the efficacy of its Marine Protected Areas, a number of which have been recently created off the central coast, with more expected to be developed off Southern California. The CalCOFI samples and database potentially provide a valuable means to assess nearshore fish and invertebrate communities historically and into the future. The value of the CalCOFI program to monitor nearshore communities has been enhanced in recent years by the addition of 9 SCCOOS stations at the 20m isobath. The data from these and other nearshore stations will be assessed as part of the OPC project for assessment of California MPAs. A proposal has been submitted through the California Department of Fish and Game to add additional nearshore stations off the central California coast.
Many of CalCOFI’s activities, including data interpretation and the following research accomplishments are primarily funded externally.
Gruber et al. (2006) have developed and tested with CalCOFI data the first eddy-resolving ecosystem simulation model of the California Current. The simulation was more successful in simulating phytoplankton dynamics nearshore, where phytoplankton growth was balanced by mesozooplankton grazing. The offshore dynamics were less realistic, possibly because microzooplankton were not included in the model. A second group, led by di Lorenzo, also reported progress at last year’s AGU meeting in developing an eddy-resolving circulation model, which is initialized using CalCOFI-derived climatological conditions.
Castro et al.’s (2006) analysis of CalCOFI data uncovered a significant decline in oxygen at depth, which accompanied a major increase in upper ocean heat content. This indicates a large increase in apparent oxygen utilization, which has led to a significant increase in inorganic nutrients. However phosphate has increased more rapidly than nitrate, leading to a significant change in the Redfield ratio.
At the 2006 AGU Ocean Sciences meeting, there were 23 CalCOFI-related papers: papers that used CalCOFI data, such as to analyze climatic trends or to test model outputs, or that were based on ancillary projects that used CalCOFI data. Highlights included papers by King and Barbeau that examined the role of iron in promoting phytoplankton production in the California Current, a region not previously known for iron limitation; initial results from the use of the Spray glider along a CalCOFI transect (Ohman, Davis, et al., and Hodges and Rudnick); further studies of zooplankton dynamics in the California Current by Lavaniegos and Ohman, the topic of a M.Sc. thesis this past year as well (Kathryn Allen, UCSD); a study of phytoplankton productivity regimes in Central California from Monterrey Bay across the California Current (Pennington et al.); and the development of historical estimates of POC in the upper ocean from satellite data, using CalCOFI and other historical time series (Stramski et al.).
Fig. 1
Cruise averages for selected properties. These averages, i.e. the individual data points, encompass data from all 66 standard CalCOFI stations. Data from the last four cruises are plotted as solid symbols; data from previous cruises are plotted as open diamonds. The solid lines represent the annual averages and the dotted lines the long-term average, which in the case of anomalies is zero. a) Mixed layer temperature—The data show temperature significantly increasing over the 1984 to 1997 time period, undergo a step change associated with the 1998 regime shift and at that point increase again. The latter increase is not ‘yet’ significant. b) Nitracline depth—which is assumed to be the depth where nitrate reached values of 1 μM. These data show that the period of shallow nitracline depths and presumed larger than average fluxes of nitrate into the euphotic zone continued over the last observation period. Similar to A, data are clearly delineated into two time periods, pre- and post-regime shift. The effect of the 97/99 ENSO event is very strong. c) CalCOFI cruise mean macrozooplankton displacement volumes plotted against time (note the log axis). Annual averages are connected by the solid line. Linear regression of values vs. time for the time periods 1984 to 1998 and 1999 to 2006 are significant (p < 0.02 and p < 0.002, respectively) with statistically identical regression coefficients ( -0.035 +/- 0.01 and -0.035 +/- 0.01 respectively). These data suggest that biological variability—a proxy for zooplankton biomass in this case—is controlled by the availability of inorganic nutrients. The latter is likely affected by water temperature which is expected to rise due to global warming.
