PROJECTS
Dr. Jaime Palter of the University of Rhode Island says “a golf course’s routine lawn care includes the spreading of large quantities of limestone nearly 20 tons for 9 holes. With that fact in mind, we realized that using a golf course’s lime deployment as our release experiment could provide an ideal, permit-free opportunity to study the effect of coastal alkalinity enhancement.” This project takes advantage of a routine lawn care technique of golf course liming. The team will monitor the carbon chemistry of a small coastal lagoon before and after the application of the limestone on a nearby golf course. The team will measure dissolved inorganic carbon, or the total amount of inorganic carbon in the water using sensors continuously measuring water properties and in weekly field sampling. They will also measure total alkalinity, the water’s buffering capacity that may increase with liming and enhance the lagoon's ability to take in carbon dioxide. These essential observations help track the sources and sinks of carbon in a system. More specifically, they will allow the team to calculate the balance of dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity in the lagoon to understand if the lagoon can further absorb carbon after the liming process. The research will also study the impact on the ecosystem and mitigation of local ocean acidification on clams. Finally, the project employs modeling simulations to understand the fate of alkalinity and dissolved inorganic carbon as it leaves the coastal zone, estimate the carbon dioxide removal achieved through observed lime application, and explore the scalability of terrestrial liming along the U.S. east coast. The modeling work is being led by UConn. The work aims to address the unknowns associated with the practice of coastal liming as a carbon dioxide removal pathway. Specifically, the team will learn more about “how this coastal liming could mitigate local acidification, promote measurable carbon dioxide removal in the coastal zone, or export alkalinity to the open ocean, and how these practices might scale along the US East Coast ”says Palter. Furthermore, the work also evaluates impacts on shellfish using this approach. Funded in part by NOAA OAP.
Collaborators: Jaime Palter (URI), Jason Grear (EPA), David Ho (UH), Robert Pockalny (URI), Rebecca Robinson (URI), and Hongjie Wang (URI).
Science to Support a Climate-Ready Dungeness Crab Fishery in the Northern California Current (NOAA NCCOS and CPO and OAP funded)
Ocean acidification (OA), hypoxia, increasing temperatures, and harmful algal blooms (HABs) have emerged as leading environmental stressors in the northern California Current Ecosystem, impacting ecosystems, fisheries, and Indigenous and other coastal communities. Climate change is already making existing marine environmental stressors worse through changes to temperature, precipitation, seasonal cycles, and ocean chemistry. For the Dungeness crab fishery, the U.S. West Coast’s most valuable fishery, hypoxia has resulted in mass mortality of crabs in commercial pots, and HAB events have led to substantial fishing curtailment including season-scale closures. The continued intensification of this suite of multi-stressors poses substantial challenges for the management of ocean resources, ecosystems, and protected species. For marine protected areas and Tribal treaty fishing areas that have fixed boundaries, uncertainties in the expression and impacts of multi-stressors (OA, hypoxia, increasing temperatures, and HABs) threaten to undercut the ability of area-based tools to safeguard marine resources.
The goal of the proposed work is to help resource managers and tribes of the northern California Current Ecosystem prepare for the anticipated impacts of climate change, by increasing their understanding of how multiple stressors are likely to impact these ecosystems in the future. Also, this work will help determine the biological sensitivity of Dungeness crabs (Metacarcinus magister) and krill (Euphausia pacifica) to OA, hypoxia, HABs, and increasing temperatures.
Ultimately, this research will help inform a formal management strategy evaluation to assess the direct and indirect effects of multiple stressors on the performance of crab fishery management in the face of continued climate and carbonate chemistry changes. The project will incorporate traditional ecological knowledge using ethnographic interviews to offer insight and highlight tribal communities’ reliance, collection, reductions, and document changes in shellfish, ocean patterns, or conditions that tribal members have noted over multiple generations while relying daily on these environments for survival, health, and ceremonial practices.
The award is supported by Fiscal Year 2022 funding from NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS), Ocean Acidification Program (OAP), the Climate Program Office (CPO), and the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Office, in partnership with the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries (ONMS).
Co-leads: Francis Chan (OSU) and Richard Feely (NOAA)
18 other Collaborators including: Jan Newton (UW/APL/NANOOS), Maria Kavanaugh (OSU), Simone Alin (NOAA), Vera Trainer (NOAA), Jenny Wadell (OCNMS), Chris Free (UCSB), Kive Oken (NOAA), Robert Cowen (OSU), Kate Richerson (NOAA), Samantha Chisholm Hatfield (OSU), Nina Bednarsek (OSU), Brendan Carter (NOAA), Elena Conser (OSU), Jack Barth (OSU)
Assessing vulnerability of the Atlantic Sea Scallop social- ecological system in the northeast waters of the US (NOAA OAP funded)
Ω from the NWA model
Of the fisheries made up of calcifiers in the Northeast United States, the Atlantic sea scallop fishery is worth more than $500 million per year, is the second highest fisheries revenue in the United States, and the largest wild scallop fishery in the world. The vulnerability and resilience of fishing communities to the effects of warming and Ocean Acidification (OA) on Northeast species is dependent on their adaptive capacity in relation to both social and environmental exposure and sensitivity factors. Our hypothesis is that a spatially- explicit regional projection of changes relative to sea scallop fishing zones can inform fishery management and allow communities that rely on Atlantic sea scallops to plan and become more resilient to future change. This work proposes to develop a recommendation to management to assist scallop industry stakeholders and managers with changes in the fishery that result from projected OA and temperature changes. The results of this project will include a projection of changes to fishing zones used as spatial rotational management areas that considers both OA and warming and relies on critical scallop growth, reproductive, and recruitment modeling. The results will be presented in a series of workshops designed with a focus group approach that includes members of the scallop fishery, oyster growers, and coastal communities that depend on this marine resource. The workshop participants ideas will be incorporated into the final recommendation. The recommendation will include identification of regions that are candidates for future fishing zones and those to consider closing or protecting through the rotational closures, potential inclusion in the currently uses spatial area management model (SAMS), the likelihood that harvest size or time to reach harvest size will remain similar to current conditions all under two different RCP scenarios, and knowledge as to the role of acidification in past change.
Co-leads: Lisa Colburn (NOAA) and Shannon Meseck (NOAA)
Collaborators: Catherine Matassa (UConn), Devora Hart (NOAA), David Bethoney (CFRF), Enrique Curchitser (Rutgers)
Oxygen Dynamics in the Southern Benguela Upwelling system (NSF funded)
We plan a combination of observations and quantitative simulations in order to understand the role of nutrient cycling in modulating hypoxic events in the SBUS. One group will take measurements of nutrients and nitrate isotope ratios. There will be a historical hydrographic data analysis piece of the SBUS. Finally, we plan to initiate an idealized circulation model of the SBUS to test hypotheses surrounding inshore nutrient trapping and incident hypoxia. In addition, we will simulate the ocean circulation and biogeochemistry of the SBUS using a realistic hind-cast model forced with realistic atmospheric, tidal, and ocean boundary conditions, to make hind-cast simulations of the 3-D circulation and hydrography throughout the domain. We will query the coupled physical-biogeochemical model to fully investigate the proposed nutrient trapping mechanism and define its role in modulating the intensity of hypoxia inter-annually.
Collaborators: Julie Granger (lead PI, UConn), Sarah Fawcett (UCT), Jennifer Jackson-Veitch (UCT)
The predictability of oxygen and its metabolic consequences for fisheries on decadal time scales (NOAA MAPP funded)
Earth system models (ESMs) project ocean conditions that are relevant to marine fisheries; over the next several decades, the ocean will warm, oxygen content will decline, and regions with low oxygen concentrations will expand. Critically, however, these trends are not spatially uniform and certain regions will experience more rapid change than others (Bopp et al. 2013). Temperature and oxygen availability jointly limit habitat viability, but are difficult to disentangle few predictive studies incorporate this information in developing projections of impacts on living marine resources (LMRs). A key physiologically mechanistic framework , the Metabolic Index (Φ, Deutsch et al. 2015) was recently developed that explicitly combines the joint influence of oxygen content in the ocean with the temperature-dependent metabolic demands for a given organism. Global ESMs have demonstrated skill in predicting physical and biological variables important to fish and fisheries on seasonal to decadal time scales of significance to management (Tommasi et al. 2016, Park et al. 2019). We propose to assess an existing forecast system’s ability to forecast metabolic indices in the global ocean on decadal timescales. Our objective is to examine the predictability of fisheries-relevant environmental variables beyond sea surface temperature and chlorophyll, such as oxygen and related metabolic metrics, as well as potential limitations on fisheries that this metabolic index projects.
Collaborators: Matt Long (NCAR) and Colleen Petrik (Texas A&M)
Modeling Climate Impacts on Predictability of Fisheries and Other LMRs (NOAA MAPP funded)
Living marine resources (LMRs) are exquisitely sensitive to climate variability and change, displaying dramatic fluctuations on seasonal-to-decadal scales and significant vulnerability to anthropogenic warming, deoxygenation, and acidification trends. The ability to predict the response of fisheries to climate variations is essential to sound LMR management. Earth system models (ESMs) are an important but underutilized tool in this context and have demonstrated predictive skill for physical and biogeochemical variables on seasonal to decadal time scales. Our primary goal is to couple FEISTY to MOM6. FEISTY provides a trait-based, size-resolved treatment of fish population dynamics and includes functional types for forage, large pelagic, and demersal fish, as well as benthic invertebrates. The primary deliverable of this work will be to equip MOM6 with the ability to explicitly represent fish using either MARBL or COBALT as the underlying OBGC model. This capability will thus be available in CESM and GFDLs ESM frameworks, benefiting a wide community of researchers. This project is a sister project to the other MAPP funded efforts listed here.
Collaborators: Matt Long (Lead PI, NCAR) and Collen Petrik (Texas A&M)
Towards the prediction of fisheries on seasonal to multi-annual time scales (NOAA MAPP funded)
The overarching task is to incorporate an offline fish model with the results of ESMs run in initialized-prediction mode to generate and assess model predictions. The work to be completed includes simulating large ensembles of seasonal to decadal-scale predictions of the physical and BGC variables of relevance to fish, which will then be used to force a mechanistic fish model, FEISTY (Petrik et al. 2019). Additionally, the results of these offline ESM-FEISTY simulations will provide a baseline for the predictions made with an online version to be developed under a separate proposal (PI M. Long, Incorporating fish in Earth system predictions). This project is a sister project to the other MAPP funded efforts listed here.
Collaborators: Collen Petrik (Lead PI, Texas A&M) and Matt Long (NCAR)
Enhancement of an existing ocean forecast system to include ocean acidification (NOAA OAP funded)
Acidification of coastal waters is of increasing concern to local fisheries. Many economically or ecologically important species (oysters, crabs, phytoplankton, zooplankton) in the Pacific Northwest are expected to feel direct effects of ocean acidification. Direct effects have been observed on the $100 million shellfish industry, and additional indirect economic impacts are possible on the finfish industry due to a loss of prey species. The ability to predict the degree of acidification as well as relevant indices of impact for species of interest could be of considerable benefit to managers. We propose to address this issue through build-out of an existing prediction system, calibrated using data from related elements of the OA program. A seasonal ocean prediction system, JISAO’s Seasonal Coastal Ocean Prediction of the Ecosystem (J-SCOPE), has recently been developed for the coastal waters of the Pacific Northwest, with funding provided by the NOAA FATE program. The goal has been to provide seasonal (six month) predictions of ocean conditions that are testable and relevant to management decisions for fisheries, protected species, and ecosystem health components. The results include IEA products (e.g. forecasts of ecological indicators). Our goal is to expand the scope of our seasonal oceanographic forecasts from J-SCOPE to explicitly include acidification. We propose additional model development and products of ecosystem relevance in four ways: 1) the addition of explicit carbonate dynamics to the J-SCOPE system; 2) correction of bias in forcing data; 3) improvement of initial/boundary conditions for the operational forecasts; 4) development of new acidification indices from model output, relevant to biological impacts. Products will include species specific indicators designed to inform managers on a six-month basis. Results will serve end users such as NOAA’s IEA and will contribute to Washington State’s Blue Ribbon Panel priorities.
Collaborators:
Simone Alin (NOAA PMEL), Samantha Siedlecki (UCONN), Albert Hermann(JISAO, UW), Nina Bednarsek (SCCWRP), Richard Feely (NOAA PMEL)
Collaborators:
Parker MacCready (Lead PI -UW), Ryan McCabe (UW/JISAO); Neil Banas (Univ. of Strathclyde)