University of California, Santa Barbara
PISCO scientists at UCSB (http://www.ucsb.edu/) study nearshore oceanography, ecological interactions, population replenishment (recruitment), and community diversity and structure. Many of PISCO's technology and information management activities are based at UCSB.
The Science Program
The primary PISCO goal is to understand the interaction of the nearshore oceanographic environment with coastal marine communities over 1200km of the West Coast of North America. This includes quantifying patterns of distribution, abundance and diversity of the biota in nearshore ecosystems, and determining how ecological, evolutionary and oceanographic processes influence these patterns. We believe that this understanding of both local and biogeographic patterns and processes must span small-to-large spatial scales and short-to-long temporal scales.
Strong evidence suggests that variation among nearshore benthic communities can depend on recruitment and such bottom-up oceanic influences as phytoplankton productivity and nutrient concentration, all of which vary significantly with currents, upwelling, and other physical oceanographic processes. We are attacking this question with intensive biological sampling of larvae, recruits, and post-settlement individuals in both subtidal and intertidal communities, combined with simultaneous monitoring of nearshore waters using a mooring array, benthically mounted Acoustic-Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP's), coastal radar units, and remote sensing. We will also directly measure key ecological processes in each intensive study area with a series of experiments and measurements monitoring predation intensity, growthrates, and condition for selected species.
While the monitoring program and coordinated field manipulative experiments will reveal the spatial and temporal patterns of community structure, we also intend to specify the degree to which local coastal populations are interconnected. We will attempt to identify the sources of recruits and dispersal patterns for pelagic larvae of coastal organisms using elemental fingerprinting and molecular genetics. Analysis of hard parts of larval organisms can indicate past residence in different water masses or coastal environments. We are initiating a program of large-scale mapping of otolith/statolith environmental signatures, coupled with identification of successive larval environments from source to settlement. To complement this empirical approach, we will use the intensive PISCO sampling scheme to reveal small- and large-scale geographic genetic structure of a series of key nearshore species, with the aim of estimating long-term average dispersal distances.
At UCSB we are focusing our portion of the PISCO studies on the region centered about Pt. Conception, California (from Cambria in the north to Ventura in the south) as well as the Channel Islands. We have a coordinated monitoring program in place in which we regularly sample recruitment of fishes and invertebrates from both nearshore moorings and intertidal sites along this range. Additionally we are carrying out several smaller-scale, process-oriented studies at a subset of our monitoring sites to evaluate the strength of ecological interactions (competition, predation, grazing) and their overall importance in structuring communities.