Karen McLaughlin, Southern California Coastal Water Research Project
Ken Schiff, Southern California Coastal Water Research Project

The Southern California Bight (SCB) is host to one of some of the most productive ecosystems in the world, providing economic, cultural and recreational services to large populations living along the coast. However, it is also subject to significant pollutant inputs due to a highly urbanized coastland. Historically, environmental monitoring of this urban coastal environment has been temporally intensive, but spatially focused on narrow areas closest to regulated discharges, providing a potentially biased perspective of overall coastal sediment and water quality. Beginning in 1994 and conducted every five years since, nearly 100 regulated, regulatory, non-governmental and academic organizations have joined forces to implement the SCB Regional Marine Monitoring Program (the Bight Program). The Bight Program has affected management actions in the region by focusing management effort on habitats most impacted by poor sediment and water quality, highlighting improvements from previous management actions, and characterizing emerging threats to the coastal zone, such as ocean acidification. The most recent Bight program sampled nearly 400 locations, from brackish estuaries to offshore basins >1000m depth, using a probabilistic survey design and measuring multiple indicators of sediment quality including chemistry, toxicity, and infauna, water quality indicators including nutrients, harmful algal bloom toxins, dissolved oxygen, pH and aragonite saturation state, biological indicators of impairment, and indicators of human pathogens. Here we will highlight some key findings and trends from the Bight Program and opportunities to join the collaboration in 2023.

K. Alexandra Curtis, NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Elizabeth M. Jaime, Ocean Associates, contractor for NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Mark S. Lowry (retired), NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center

Since June 1981, NOAA Fisheries biologists have been collecting and processing California sea lion scats from key rookeries on the southern Channel Islands, creating what is now a 40-year-long quarterly time series of forage for an important generalist predator. Female California sea lions from the southern Channel Islands primarily forage in the Southern California Bight, so the time series provides an unparalleled direct view of this region’s variable forage community and its relationship to the environment, to local wetfish fisheries, and to upper trophic levels. Continued funding for the southern Channel Islands sea lion diet time series has become increasingly uncertain following the retirement of its long-term lead principal investigator, putting the project at risk just as we begin to glimpse the radical shifts in store for the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem (CCLME) under global climate change. We outline the data available from this time series and discuss ongoing work and future potential for improving our understanding of the CCLME past, present, and future, and supporting evolution of fisheries management in the CCLME towards a multi-species, ecosystem-based framework.

Erica Mason, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Allison N. Kellum, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Jennifer A. Chiu, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories
Grant T. Waltz, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Samantha Murray, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Dean E. Wendt, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Richard M. Starr, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories
Brice X. Semmens, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

Marine spatial planning efforts, including the management and monitoring of marine protected areas (MPAs), increasingly focus on the importance of stakeholder engagement. For 15 years, the California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program (CCFRP) has partnered volunteer anglers with researchers, the fishing industry, and resource managers to monitor groundfishes in California’s network of MPAs. While the program has succeeded in generating valuable data useful for evaluating MPA effectiveness, we know little about volunteer angler demography or the impact of participation on their perceptions and opinions on fisheries data or MPAs. We surveyed CCFRP volunteers to in part, learn whether participation in the program influenced volunteer angler opinions on the creation of MPAs in California and the factors driving opinion change. We found that a positive change in opinion on MPAs was likely to occur after considerable time (7+ years) engaged with CCFRP. In the context of CCFRP, our results serve the purpose of realizing the perceived benefits of citizen scientist participation in Collaborative Fisheries Research (e.g., increased awareness and trust in marine science/management). More broadly, human dimension surveys can be used as social indicators of consumer health and attitudes toward resource management efforts, thereby identifying areas where more directed public outreach and increased transparency in policy decisions are needed. Given the uncertainty of our fisheries in the face of climate change, keeping a gauge on the human dimensions of marine resource management will be important for maintaining and strengthening stakeholder engagement in the process.

Natalie Low, Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System (CeNCOOS)
Florybeth La Valle, Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System
Henry Ruhl, Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System
Clarissa Anderson, Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System

California’s statewide MPA network was established through the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act, with the goals of protecting marine populations, habitats, and ecosystems, improving fisheries sustainability, and enhancing coastal recreation, economies, and heritage. The 2022 state decadal review of the MPA network aims to assess its success in achieving these goals. However, state waters, including MPAs are impacted by different drivers across many temporal and spatial scales, including resource use, climatological and oceanographic variability, and long-term climate change. This presents a challenge in understanding the patterns and drivers affecting short- and long-term trajectories of change in MPAs. The Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System (CeNCOOS) and Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS) have integrated climatological, oceanographic, ecological, and model output data from multiple sources to develop an MPA Dashboard Tool for exploration, access, and visualization of MPA-relevant data to support researchers and managers in MPA assessments and decision-making. These take the form of a set of integrated Shiny applications in R: (1) Environmental and Ecological Time Series, (2) Projected Climate Change Indicators, (3) Ecological Models, (4) MPA Connectivity. Here, we present the use of these tools, as well as ongoing analyses on MPAs and climate refugia in California state waters.

Laura Rogers-Bennett, California Department of Fish and Wildlife / UC Davis
Marisol Garcia-Reyes, Farallon Institute
Meredith L. McPherson, UC Santa Cruz
Tom W. Bell, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Bull kelp forests support species-rich nearshore marine ecosystems that provide a wide range of ecosystem services. Bull kelp ecosystem services include recreational and commercial fisheries, species diversity, sequester carbon and diminish waves and coastal erosion. During the 2014-2016 marine heatwave the previously stable kelp forest collapsed (>90%) and the ecosystem shifted to sea urchins barrens revealing the critical need for reliable indicators of kelp forest ecosystems. Here we develop indicators of the kelp forest canopy using oceanographic indexes, herbivore density and the presence predatory sea stars. We use a new time series of kelp canopy developed using Landsat 5, 7, and 8 imagery for northern California from 38 to 40 degrees latitude. We examine the relationship between the kelp canopy and the seasonal Multivariate Ocean Climate Indicator (MOCI) that focuses on the coastal region. MOCI synthesizes variability in coastal water temperatures, upwelling-favorable winds, atmospheric pressure, upwelling index, sea level height, as well as the influence of regional climate oscillations, and tracks warm and upwelling-poor conditions (positive), as well as cool and strong upwelling (negative) years. We find that winter MOCI values are a good early warning as they predict peak kelp canopy the following summer. We determine a threshold of 2.5 times the MOCI average (from 1991-2000) as the cut off for poor kelp conditions. However, in the most recent years, the relationship between MOCI and kelp breaks down as the abundance of herbivorous sea urchins increases. Therefore, we establish an indicator of high sea urchin abundance at 5 times the average density (from 2003-2013) and establish that predatory sunflower stars are locally extinct. Tracking indicators of kelp forest health and establishing informative thresholds are essential for proactive kelp ecosystem management and restoration.

Will Fennie, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Rachel Seary, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Barbara Muhling, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Steven J. Bograd, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Stephanie Brodie, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Megan Cimino, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Elliott L. Hazen, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Michael G. Jacox, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Elizabeth A. McHuron, University of Washington
Sharon Melin, NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center
Jarrod A. Santora, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Justin J. Suca, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Julie Thayer, Farallon Institute
Andrew R. Thompson, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Pete Warzybok, Point Blue Conservation Science
Desiree Tommasi, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center

Forage fishes are key energy conduits that transfer primary and secondary productivity to higher trophic levels and obtaining an understanding these pathways is central to ecosystem-based management. Elucidating environment-prey-predator links is critical to understand bottom-up forcing of food webs, and because novel environmental conditions induced by climate change may alter ecosystem and trophic dynamics. In the northeast Pacific, northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax) is an important forage species whose population size can change by orders of magnitude from year to year. Anchovy population sizes were low for most of the 21st century before resurging during the 2014-2016 North Pacific marine heatwave. Habitat suitability metrics from an anchovy species distribution model (SDM) incorporating anchovy population size and environmental conditions were assessed as indicators of the diet, distribution, and reproduction of California sea lions and three seabird species. This anchovy ecosystem indicator (AEI) was strongly positively correlated with diet composition of all species and the at-sea distribution of Common murre, Brandt’s cormorant, and California sea lion. Additionally, reproduction of cormorants and sea lions were strongly positively correlated with the AEI. Our newly developed AEI demonstrates the utility of forage species SDMs to creating ecosystem indicators that can serve as a template to guide ecosystem management in the northeast Pacific and worldwide.

Karen Martin, Pepperdine University

“Midnight spawning runs of California grunion, Leuresthes tenuis (Atherinopsidae), have fascinated people for generations, inspiring music, film, art, and television. Native to southern California, this marine fish surfs onto sandy beaches for spawning, sometimes in great numbers, on spring and summer nights following high semilunar tides. Eggs buried under the surface incubate in the warm, moist sand onshore until tides wash them out to hatch. Grunion runs are iconic for southern California beach culture, appreciated by locals and tourists. Monitoring the spawning runs of California Grunion is achieved with citizen scientists, the Grunion Greeters. Because of tidal cues, likely dates and times for runs can be forecast. Using the Walker Scale metric developed for this purpose, volunteer reports provide hyperlocal data on the locations, extent, size, and duration of the runs, as well as predators, hunters, and other information about the beach. While on land, embryos are vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbance from vehicles, beach grooming, oil spills, and habitat loss from coastal construction, as well as natural predation, erosion of sand, and high temperatures. Grunion are caught in a unique recreational fishery by bare hands, with a closed season during peak spawning. Runs are also impacted by artificial lights; California Grunion tend to avoid areas brighter than a full moon. Over the past 20 years, California Grunion runs have generally become less frequent and less abundant in southern California. Simultaneously, a northward habitat shift is underway, with new populations in San Francisco Bay and beyond. The sand temperatures where eggs incubate, as well as ocean warming, constrain grunion reproduction. The dependence on sandy beaches for critical reproductive habitat, their cultural appeal, and the ease of observation of spawning runs, make California Grunion a charismatic choice as an Indicator Species for sandy beach biodiversity and climate change. “

Pierre-Yves Hernvann, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz; Northwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA
Isaac Kaplan, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA
Desiree Tommasi, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz; Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA
Joe Bizzarro, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz; Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA
Brian Wells, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA
Heidi Dewar, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA
Jarrod Santora, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz; Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA
Barbara Muhling, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz; Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA

In the California Current ecosystem, a portfolio of pelagic species, such as Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax), Northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax), Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), chub (Scomber japonicus) and jack (Trachurus symmetricus) mackerels and California market squid (Doryteuthis opalescens) support a wide variety of fish, mammal and seabird predators. Over the last decades, these so-called coastal pelagic species (CPS) have experienced substantial changes in their distribution that are predicted to continue in the near future. By affecting the quantity, diversity and quality of food available, such changes could affect the dynamic of the whole predator community in the California Current. To study the sensitivity of the predators to changes in CPS distribution in the California Current, we propose a novel ecosystem model-based approach. The present approach relies on a refined end-to-end food-web model integrating data from a comprehensive diet database and statistical species distribution models (SDMs) of both CPS and their predators. Forced by SDMs representing past CPS distribution for contrasting years, our Atlantis ecosystem model may be able to predict the spatiotemporal changes in the diet, the consumption and abundance of predators in the system. The model predictions may reflect predators’ ability to cope with CPS distribution shifts by maintaining food intakes compatible with their population requirements. Such ability could be linked to predators’ mobility, diet plasticity, and climate change impacts on their own distribution, and would provide a basis for the calculation of risk indicators in a climate change context. These indicators may be of interest in the near future to anticipate and adapt management and conservation of both emblematic protected species and commercially important fisheries.

James Smith, NOAA SWFSC
Mercedes Pozo Buil, NOAA SWFSC
Jerome Fiechter, UCSC
Desiree Tommasi, NOAA SWFSC
Michael Jacox, NOAA SWFSC

A useful measure of general climate stress is where and when novel habitats emerge. Here we evaluate ‘climate envelope novelty’ – a spatial indicator of system-level habitat change – in the California Current System (CCS), by quantifying the emergence of novel ocean conditions in multivariate physical-biogeochemical space. We use downscaled climate projections from three earth system models out to 2100 under emission scenario RCP8.5, and detect novelty at multiple spatial-temporal scales using two methods (n-dimensional hypervolumes and extrapolation detection). Even under high emissions, consistent novelty doesn’t appear until around 2040 and then only in small patches of Southern California and the Pacific North West. However, novelty increases rapidly after this (especially in warmer seasons), so that by 2060 up to 50% of the CCS in an average year has shifted to a novel local climate, which increases to 100% by 2090. These results are for the average year, and the first years to experience these levels of novelty typically occur 20 years sooner. The ecosystem could increasingly experience novel combinations of warmer temperatures, lower dissolved oxygen (especially inshore), and a shallower mixed layer (especially offshore). The emergence of extensive local novelty year-round has implications for the required ubiquitous redistribution or adaptation of CCS ecology, and the emergence of extensive regional novelty in warmer months has implications for bioregional change and emerging fisheries. This multi-scale novelty metric could be a useful general indicator of change, and tailored to specific species, species groups, or fisheries, or calculated relative to different historical windows (e.g. 5 years, 10 years, 50 years).

Felipe Quezada, University of California Santa Cruz
Desiree Tommasi, Institute of Marine Sciences UCSC
Stephen Stohs, NOAA SWFSC
Isaac Kaplan, NOAA NWFSC
Jonathan Sweeney, NOAA PIFSC
Barbara Muhling, Institute of Marine Sciences UCSC

Fishers for forage species typically face a set of possible choices, called fishing portfolios, that allow them to diversify target species and reduce income risk. Switching among species is more feasible for vessels that share similar gear and methods for fishing. More diverse portfolios may increase fisher resilience to climate-driven changes in target species spatial distributions and availability. However, regulations and other constraints (e.g., port constraints on where landings of a particular species may occur, or permit requirements) may reduce the degree of substitution we observe. In this study, we analyze how historical changes in forage species distribution and the closure of the Pacific sardine fishery affected landing substitution between three coastal pelagic species: Pacific sardine, market squid, and Northern anchovy. Using a discrete choice modeling approach, we also study how spatial distribution and closure affected the coastal pelagic species fisheries’ participation decisions over the 2000-2019 period. Our preliminary results show strong substitution between market squid and Pacific sardine when both were available, while the Pacific sardine closure in 2015 was associated with reduced market squid landings suggesting lower fishers’ participation in this fishery. We plan to use species distribution model projections to study how landings and participation change under different future climate change scenarios.

Julia Mason, Environmental Defense Fund
Jacob Eurich (co first author), National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
Jacqueline Lau (co first author), ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University
Willow Battista, EDF
Christopher Free, UCSB
Katherine Mills, Gulf of Maine Research Institute
Kanae Tokunaga, Gulf of Maine Research Institute
Lily Zhao, UCSB
Mark Dickey-Collas, ICES
Mireia Valle, AZTI Marine Research, Basque Research and Technology Alliance
Gretta Pecl, University of Tasmania
Joshua Cinner, James Cook University
Tim McClanahan, Wildlife Conservation Society
Whitney Friedman, NCEAS/The Nature Conservancy
Edward Allison, WorldFish
Claudio Silva, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso
Eleuterio Yanez, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso
Maria Barbieri, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso
Kristin Kleisner, EDF

In a changing climate, there is an imperative to build coupled social-ecological systems – including fisheries – that can withstand or adapt to climate stressors. Although resilience theory identifies system attributes that supposedly confer resilience, these attributes have rarely been clearly defined, mechanistically explained, nor tested and applied to inform fisheries governance. Here, we develop and apply a comprehensive resilience framework to examine fishery systems across (i) ecological, (ii) socio-economic, and (iii) governance dimensions using five resilience domains: assets, flexibility, organization, learning, and agency. We distill and define 38 attributes that confer climate resilience from a coupled literature- and expert-driven approach, describe how they apply to fisheries and provide illustrative examples of resilience attributes in action. Our synthesis highlights that the directionality and mechanism of these attributes depend on the specific context, capacities, and scale of the focal fishery system and associated stressors, and we find evidence of interdependencies among attributes. Overall, however, we find few studies that test resilience attributes in fisheries across all parts of the system, with most examples focusing on the ecological dimension. As such, meaningful quantification of the attributes’ contributions to resilience remains a challenge. Our synthesis and holistic framework represent a starting point for critical application of resilience concepts to fisheries social-ecological systems.

Rachel Seary, Institute of Marine Sciences-Fisheries Collaborative Program, University of California, Santa Cruz/ Fisheries Ecology Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Jarrod A. Santora, Fisheries Ecology Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center/Department of Applied Math, University of California, Santa Cruz
Desiree Tommasi, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz/Fisheries Research Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Andrew Thompson, Fisheries Research Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Steven Bograd, Environmental Research Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center
Kate Richerson, Fishery Resource Analysis and Monitoring Division, Northwest Fisheries Science Center
Dan Holland, Conservation Biology Division, Northwest Fisheries Science Center
Stephanie Brodie, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz/Environmental Research Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center

Understanding ecosystem dynamics which lead to increased whale entanglement risk for the Dungeness Crab Fishery has benefited from the development of ecosystem indicators for the California Current Ecosystem. Management tools used to reduce entanglement risk, for example temporary area restrictions including closures due to marine life concentrations, may have severe socio-economic consequences for stakeholders that must be evaluated at the individual fisher and fishing community level. Achieving ecosystem-based fisheries management which successfully reduces whale entanglements, while promoting a healthy Dungeness Crab Fishery, along with other West Coast fisheries, will benefit from the addition of socio-economic indicators that relay information on the impact of such management tools on the fishing community. The objective of our analysis is therefore to present retrospective revenue loss estimates from whale entanglement risk related closures to the Dungeness crab fishery in California. Retrospective estimates of potential revenues during seasons subject to closure periods, using hurdle models fitted with pre-season crab abundance estimates and historical vessel level characteristics, are compared with observed revenues to arrive upon loss estimates. Consideration of this information alongside existing ecological indicators will be necessary to inform future risk assessment decisions for this fishery.

Marina Frants, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Chieh Hsu, U.C. San Diego
Erin Satterthwaite, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

The California Current System is a rich and diverse ecosystem, supporting a wide variety of marine plant and animal species that provide substantial economic, social and cultural benefits to coastal communities. However, it also faces significant pressure from human activities such as fishing, tourism, and commercial and residential development. To understand the impact of human activity on the marine ecosystem, researchers require long-term ocean data. At Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) ecosystem observing program and the California Sea Grant program are working in partnership to develop OceanView, an interactive citizen science app intended to supplement existing long term observations in the California Current. The app will allow recreational fishers to upload detailed information on species they caught or observed. Users will be able to record the species name, the time and location of the observation, and the size and weight of individual specimens, as well as upload a photo. To aid users with species identification, the app will provide a search function that utilizes National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) FishWatch database, as well as suggestions from an image recognition algorithm. To motivate users to to use the app, we will provide additional functionality, including a real-world map providing locations and visitor information of California’s Marine Protected Areas, and the ability for users to view statistical information of observations at their location. The collected data can be used in conjunction with existing long-term sampling to support research activities such as species population and distribution modeling and detection of invasive species. In addition, we hope that allowing the general public to become more involved in ocean observations will raise awareness of the importance of marine research and conservation.

Brian Wells, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Jarrod A. Santora, SWFSC, NOAA Fisheries

We present a conceptual understanding of how empirical studies and biophysical models can be used to provide ecosystem benefits. Empirical observations and statistical modeling provide measures of the states of individual ecosystem components, a conceptual understanding of the system, and the opportunity to develop functional relationships within the ecosystem. This provides indicators on which to assess risks to ecosystem components, the opportunity for semi-quantitative analyses from a conceptual model, and sensitivity analysis to evaluate the leverage ecosystem components have on accomplishing managerial objectives. Empirical outputs and diagnosed processes can be coupled to biophysical models to evaluate spatiotemporal variability in ecosystem structure and functionality retrospectively and prospectively. Further, by quantifying the relationships between the environment and spatiotemporal variability of managed ecosystem components, we can estimate the spatiotemporal responses of these components to future climate trends and variability. These coupled, numerical approaches provide a spatiotemporal coverage of ecosystem state, inform near and long-term risks, and can be used to evaluate management strategies.