Monitoring of Central Coast Marine Protected Areas Begins

June 21, 2007

Contact: Christina S. Johnson, csjohnson@ucsd.edu, 858-822-5334

Credit: ©Eric Hanauer

Central Coast, CA – Scientists have been awarded $2 million to begin monitoring the ecological and socioeconomic effects of the recently designated Central Coast marine protected areas (MPAs), which will ban or limit fishing in about 18 percent of state waters between Santa Barbara and San Mateo counties.

“We are beginning the most comprehensive survey yet of the status of marine resources in the Central Coast region," said the Ocean Protection Council's Christine Blackburn, who is managing the Baseline Data Collection Project, a one-year, state-funded effort to characterize marine life and habitats within and outside the Central Coast’s 29 marine protected areas before new fishing regulations go into effect and then in the first few months following their enforcement.

This “before” snapshot will serve as a reference point for detecting long-term ecological change associated with the Central Coast project. With future monitoring, scientists will be able to evaluate the network’s effectiveness in protecting marine habitats, preserving ecosystem integrity, and otherwise meeting the many goals of the state’s Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA). “What we learn from this work will help inform management decisions far into the future,” Blackburn said.

Administered by California Sea Grant, the Baseline Data Collection Project also initiates another of the act’s goals–“to monitor the new marine protected areas and to use what is learned to improve marine policies and management and to otherwise inform the ongoing process of establishing marine protected areas along all of the different regions of the coast." The Central Coast was the first region to get marine protected areas. The next will be the North Central Coast.

“The baseline data will allow us to review how these protected areas are performing and to make adjustments accordingly, as we move forward with the MLPA,” said John Ugoretz, who is leading the implementation of the MLPA at the California Department of Fish and Game.

In terms of its scientific objectives, a main component of the baseline project is to count and speciate fishes and invertebrates in key areas, and to use this data to compute biologically meaningful quantities such as fish density and distribution, species diversity, and relative species abundance.

Rick Starr viewing 3-D image of Monterey Bay. Credit: UCANR.

Manned submersibles will be used to survey the deepest areas, while teams of divers will work the shallower ones. The surveys will be most intense in four key habitat types, identified as priority areas by the science advisory team to the Central Coast project. These are deep rocky habitats, including submarine canyons and cold-water corals; kelp forests; deep soft-bottomed habitat, about which little is known; and the rocky intertidal, which can be surveyed from the shore.

In addition to gathering biological information, scientists also will conduct a baseline socioeconomic study to assess the impacts of the marine protected areas on commercial and recreational fishers, as well as “non-consumptive users,” such as kayakers, windsurfers and divers.

There is also a collaborative fisheries component of the project that will harness the expertise of commercial and recreational fishers to fill gaps in the other survey methods by counting fishes through trap and hook-and-line surveys.

The lead investigators of the five projects, which were selected in June through a competitive grant review process, are:

Peter Raimondi, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who will lead surveys of rocky intertidal habitats.

Mark Carr, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who will lead diver surveys of kelp forests.

Rick Starr, a California Sea Grant Marine Advisor, and Mary Yoklavich of NOAA Fisheries, who will use a manned submersible to survey deep-water habitats.

John S. Petterson and Edward Glazier, both consultants with Impact Assessment, Inc. in La Jolla, who will lead socioeconomic studies, which will be based on a series of interviews with consumptive and non-consumptive users.

Dean Wendt, a biologist at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Sea Grant Marine Advisor Rick Starr, who will lead the collaborative fisheries project.

All raw data from these projects will be submitted to the California Department of Fish and Game in the spring of 2008 for analysis by its staff. Fish and Game also plans to conduct diver and ROV (remotely operated vehicle) surveys to supplement the outside survey work, Ugoretz said.

The Central Coast MPA Baseline Data Collection Project is a collaboration of the California Coastal Conservancy, Ocean Protection Council, California Department of Fish and Game, and California Sea Grant Program. Funding was made possible through a one-time appropriation from the state’s General Fund to the California Coastal Conservancy and Ocean Protection Council.

For maps and more information about the Central Coast MPAs, visit the California Dept. of Fish and Game website at: http://www.dfg.ca.gov/mrd/mlpa

NOAA's California Sea Grant is a statewide, multi-university program of marine research, extension services, and education activities. It is the largest of the nation's 30 Sea Grant programs and is headquartered at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. The National Sea Grant College Program is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), U.S. Department of Commerce.