Anticipated Products
A successful U.S. GLOBEC program in the Northeast Pacific will produce four benefits that would
not occur without this program.
- Improved knowledge of the impact of climate variability on marine ecosystems of the eastern
North Pacific. Specifically, the program will elucidate mechanisms controlling the abundance and
distributions of marine populations, including commercially important fish and benthic species. The
improved mechanistic understanding of the coupling between physics and biology will be helpful no
matter how future climate evolves. When coupled with improved monitoring systems and biophysical
models, the improved mechanistic understanding will improve the reliability of predictions of the
future composition of marine communities.
- The development and/or refinement of coupled biophysical models that could be used to
examine hypotheses regarding potential impacts of climate variability on marine ecosystems. These
models will improve our ability to integrate biological, physical, and climatological observations in
coastal ecosystems.
- Data sets will be collected and analyzed during the program that will provide the basis of
future research activities in the region. These include historical data sets, data from process-oriented
field studies, and data from any longer-term monitoring that we initiate.
- A new basis for resource management. The information generated by this U.S. GLOBEC
program will enable those responsible for managing living marine resources to move beyond the
traditional fisheries management approach towards a new paradigm that integrates environmental and
ecosystem data to better account for variability in production and recruitment. It is now recognized
that variability in ocean physical conditions and plankton communities impact the production of living
marine resources. It is essential that the environment and ecosystem become a part of fisheries
management and that a more holistic, multispecies, ecosystem-oriented approach be used to monitor
and regulate the health of our nation's coastal ecosystems, including it's valuable commercially
harvested species.
