Posted on 20-2-2003

Secrets of Coastal Conservation
By Cat Lazaroff, Environmental News Service

WASHINGTON, DC, February 19, 2003 (ENS) - New findings about the dynamics
of coastal ocean ecosystems are prompting marine scientists to abandon long
held assumptions about life in the sea and how best to protect it. Working
along coasts from California to the Caribbean, researchers say they have
cracked the "black box" of coastal ecosystems, revealing the inner workings
of the near shore marine environment.

The results of research into topics as tiny as microscopic fish larvae, and
as broad as the 1,200 mile long California Current that sweeps the west
coast of the United States, have brought new light to questions about how
to predict and manage coastal ecosystems and marine populations. At a
scientific symposium last weekend at the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, a team of
scientists said their studies show an urgent need for governments to
overhaul existing laws aimed at protecting marine ecosystems. Jane
Lubchenco leads the PISCO team. (Photo courtesy PISCO)
"Coastal oceans are under intense pressure due to overfishing, coastal
development and land based pollution. Lack of understanding of the dynamics
of coastal ecosystems has seriously impeded management and policy efforts,"
said principal investigator Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University.
"Coastal zones are not only home to over 50 percent of Americans - they are
also home to a great majority of commercial and non-commercial marine
species, as well as pivotal for industrial and recreational activities. The
grand challenge is to use coastal oceans without misusing them," added
Lubchenco, former president of AAAS and a member of the Pew Oceans
Commission. "Our new findings will greatly aid ocean protection,
restoration and sustainable use."

Lubchenco leads an interdisciplinary team of more than 100 ecologists,
oceanographers, geneticists and engineers studying the coastal zone,
extending about 10 kilometers (about six miles) out from the shore. This
near shore region is often called "the bad zone" because its three
dimensional nature, complex currents, shallow water and high wave energy
have stymied oceanographers and their large vessels.

Now, scientists from the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of
Coastal Oceans (PISCO), which includes Oregon State University,
Universities of California at Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz and Stanford
University's Hopkins Marine Station, are comprehensively exploring the
coastal zone along the U.S. West coast. For the first time, these
researchers are integrating genetics, microchemistry, oceanography and
computer based mapping to solve the mysteries of how near shore currents
link populations, habitats and ecosystems on the regional scale. "It's
ironic that we've known so little about this critical area," said Steve
Palumbi of Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station. "We know more about the
productivity of the open ocean 1,000 miles off Hawaii, than we do 100 yards
off the west coast." "We really haven't understood how coastal ecosystems
are put together - which makes it difficult to reconstruct them," added
Robert Warner of UC Santa Barbara. "It's a very complicated place."

The researchers are finding areas of special productivity where fishes and
invertebrates concentrate and grow more quickly, and they are beginning to
understand why these concentrations exist, providing new insights that
apply to coastal management worldwide. "There's certainly a lot of
variation along the coast," observed Hopkins biologist Mark Denny, the John
B. and Jean De Nault Professor of Marine Sciences at Stanford. "For
instance, if you put little bare plastic or ceramic plates down in the
intertidal zone in Oregon and come back a couple of weeks later, the plates
are likely to be covered with barnacles."

But when Denny and his colleagues tried the same experiment a few hundred
miles south of Oregon along California's Monterey Bay, the results were
dramatically different. "We put out 200 plates for two years running, and
we had maybe 10 barnacles on all of them," Denny recalled. "So there are
just whopping differences in the rate at which barnacle larvae are being
recruited into the system, depending on where on the coast you are."

Historic approaches to managing oceans have focused on individual species
or suites of similar species such as salmon or groundfish, because they
were prime targets for commercial fishing. "There is strong consensus that
the 'target species' approach is insufficient and there is emerging
recognition of the need to switch to ecosystem based management, yet there
is precious little understanding of what that actually means," said Lubchenco.

Ecosystem based management will require taking into account the movements
of larvae, the importance of preserving individuals and habitats,
interactions among species, and how all of those change with larger scale
ocean processes such as El Nino and climate change. PISCO scientists are
beginning to visualize the spatial and temporal variability of coastal life
and to tease apart the differences between human impacts and natural
fluctuations. "We used to think that marine organisms went vast distances
when they floated in the sea, but it turns out that that they are not
really going that far," said Palumbi. "We're finding that the oceans are
not just one big neighborhood but are chopped up into smaller ones. In
fact, every bit of coastline might be a small neighborhood that we can
manage and try to preserve on its own." Findings like these may provide the
information needed to design effective strategies for sustaining delicate
coastal marine environments, said Palumbi, who last month authored a Pew
Oceans Commission report calling for the creation of a network of marine
reserves from Hawaii to Florida. "If we're going to manage the ocean, it's
really going to be on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis," Palumbi added.
"The very existence of those neighborhoods is a very different way of
looking at the ocean than we thought before." "Ten years ago, the
conventional wisdom was that these populations were just one big mix up and
down the coast - and that's how fisheries are managed at the state and
local level," he explained. "The fact these neighborhoods exist means that
it's possible for there to be local benefits, and that's one of the things
that will make a big difference in getting local communities to begin
protecting chunks of the sea."

Increasing numbers of people are settling along ocean coastlines, bringing
rapid changes to these areas and lending urgency to the need to examine
human impacts on coastal ecosystems, the AAAS speakers noted. "We need to
know how these ecosystems work so that we can make better use of applied
management strategies," said Warner. "Right now, it's a little like knowing
that someone is sick and a particular pill helps, but not understanding why
or how. We need to know the underlying mechanisms crucial for sustaining
coastal ecosystems."

A key question, Warner noted, is where various coastal marine species
travel as they grow and disperse. "These underwater environments are
characterized by very complicated ocean processes and by tiny organisms
that are drifting in a 'blanket' for weeks or months," he explained.
"Eventually, they settle into habitats and replenish populations. But, the
real challenge is to describe this dispersal and how coastal communities
are put together. When settlement occurs, where do the young come from? We
need to know because the current trend is spatial management - that is,
drawing lines across the ocean, for zoning purposes."

Innovative new tools, including genetic mapping of marine populations, are
revealing that near shore underwater neighborhoods "are a lot smaller and
cozier than we ever imagined," Palumbi said. Thus, "Action taken locally,
in a particular area, can have a very strong effect" in protecting near
shore marine environments, Warner added. New research shows that many
marine species stick close to home, or at least do not always disperse
forever, as scientists long believed, according to Palumbi. Such
information may suggest a need to redraw ocean zoning lines.

Palumbi and Warner have written an article that will appear in a
forthcoming issue of "Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment," the
journal of the Ecological Society of America. The article, "New Tools for
Designing Effective Marine Reserves," outlines several research tools that
the authors argue will be critical to learning more about the usefulness
and impact of one emerging management tool - marine reserves.

Four research methods are helping scientists learn more about the impacts
of marine reserves on the ecosystems in which they are imbedded, the
authors said. Remote ocean sensing, in real time, over short spatial and
temporal scales, is helping scientists chart the dynamics of ocean
environments at scales as small as one kilometer, revealing the physical
connections between reserve and non-reserve areas.

The chemical signal of trace metals in growing skeletons of key marine
species now allows researchers to track where larvae and juveniles drift in
the sea. Genetic differences among populations provide a general method for
indirect monitoring of species dispersal, both inside and outside reserves.
And computer based mapping tools make it possible to place layers of
ecosystem information into an accessible geographic context, using global
information satellite (GIS) databases.

By using such new research tools to open the black box of the near-shore
underwater world, scientists hope to better assess the array of
conservation options, from marine reserves to large scale restoration. New
investigative strategies "help inform management because they describe
ecosystem patterns over the spatial and temporal scales that are directly
relevant to conservation and ecosystem management," the "Frontiers in
Ecology and the Environment" article concludes.

While the new science offers hope that scientists will someday understand
how to restore damaged ecosystems, Lubchenco cautions that much research is
left to be done. "We need to acknowledge the reality of uncertainty. Even
though we are making great headway in understanding the causes of
variability in ocean populations, the complexity and inherent uncertainty
of the coastal ecosystem points towards the need to build in buffers," she
said. "An example might be designing networks of reserves that can take
advantage of variability - protecting a variety of habitats and
oceanographic features so that we will be more likely to sustain
populations in the long term, through the ups and downs of natural
fluctuations - some reserves might be good one year, others next year, some
during El Nino years."

In order to restore ecosystems, managers will have to consider all scales,
from larvae to the entire ecosystem. "Now there is real hope that there can
be local benefits from local conservation efforts," Palumbi said. "The
adage 'think globally act locally' has never been applied to the ocean
because we thought the ocean would quickly dilute local conservation
efforts. But now we can begin to see how to use this powerful approach in
the ocean realm."