CalOceans News
Showing all articles with tag: monitoring enterprise.
Studying southern California's ocean
July 22nd, 2011Southern California will soon have a new system of underwater parks to keep treasured ocean areas thriving. The state has announced an October 1 effective date for the marine protected area approved last December.
Community and nonprofit groups are already gearing up to help spread the word and steward protected areas in their backyards. A number of citizen science programs are also underway to track activities in and around the parks, and a set of official baseline monitoring projects will kick off shortly.
On July 15, the Ocean Protection Council awarded $4 million in funding for a series of research projects that will help scientists understand the current health of planned protected areas. The projects, which will collect baseline information for up to three years, will target marine life and habitats, as well as commercial and recreational activities, inside and outside the protected areas.
Teams of researchers, citizen-scientists, and fishermen will survey southern California’s sandy beaches, rocky shores, kelp beds and deep-water ecosystems to increase our understanding of marine science and enable the state to track results from the network of protected ocean areas.
A Census for Sea Life
April 23rd, 2010For all the armies of scientists and thousands of hours spent researching the sea, it’s amazing how little we still know about it. For example, we still don’t know exactly how this Californian water worm glues things together underwater (although the Navy sure would like to figure it out!).
Fortunately, there’s a global Census of Marine Life being conducted right now, and the decade-long project is set to be completed and the findings released in October. The census has involved more than 2,000 scientists from more than 80 nations, who thus far have discovered more than 5,000 new forms of marine life. Researchers think there may be several times that many yet to be found.
The ocean, it seems, is like the rainforest: the more we learn, the more we realize how little we actually understand! But as research progresses, we learn more about what makes our oceans work, and this understanding allows us to make better decisions about how to manage our aquatic natural resources.
Here in California, scientists are embarking on the most comprehensive study of coastal ecosystems ever as part of the science follow-up to the Marine Life Protection Act. They are in the water now gathering basline data on kelp, fish, and other sea life, and will be collecting information both inside of and around northern California's new marine protected areas to track their progress.
Archive
- August 2009
- September 2009
- October 2009
- November 2009
- December 2009
- January 2010
- February 2010
- March 2010
- April 2010
- May 2010
- June 2010
- July 2010
- August 2010
- September 2010
- October 2010
- November 2010
- December 2010
- January 2011
- February 2011
- March 2011
- April 2011
- May 2011
- June 2011
- July 2011
- August 2011
- September 2011
- October 2011
- November 2011
- December 2011
- January 2012
- February 2012
- March 2012
- April 2012
Subscribe to our mailing list:
