The 2015 CalCOFI Conference will be held at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, CA, from Dec. 14-16. The symposium of the conference is entitled “What Can Animal Telemetry Tell Us About Fisheries, MPAs and Nearshore Oceanography in the California Current”. Contributed papers and posters are also being accepted on a variety of marine topics.
All information regarding the conference, including registration forms, conference hotels, and deadlines, can be found at the CalCOFI conference website at: http://oceaninformatics.ucsd.edu/calcofi/conference/
Important Reminders:
- Abstracts for verbal presentations and poster titles are due Nov. 6. Sample abstract format is shown below.
- The room reservation deadline for conference rates for one of the hotels in Monterey is Nov. 13. Rooms may only be available at the conference rate after this date if space permits.
- Please register and pay the registration fee by Dec. 1. The form is available on the conference website. You can use a credit or debit card, PayPal account, or personal check (US only).
Sample Abstract format: Times New Roman font, size 12, center justify title, authors, and affiliations, full justify text.
Beyond the mean: ‘Event-scale’ phenomena and their relationship to ecosystem forecasting
Mark D. Ohman1, Uwe Send1, Dan L. Rudnick1, David A. Demer2,
Todd R. Martz1, Richard A. Feely3
1Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla
2Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NMFS/NOAA, La Jolla
3Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, NOAA, Seattle
The advent of mooring and glider programs in the southern California Current System has made it possible to resolve ‘event-scale’ perturbations in the upper ocean, a significant advance over the coarse temporal and spatial resolution of the past. The detection and resolution of high-frequency phenomena is important because these events are thought to play a disproportionate role in determining nutrient fluxes, organism exposure to acidified waters and hypoxia, larval fish feeding success, and carbon export. We will illustrate examples of both temporal and spatial ‘events’ that have significant ecosystem impacts. Moored observations resolve upwelling event-triggered blooms, causing low pH, undersaturated conditions that first augment, then draw down pCO2. Such observations also permit us to measure nitrate consumption and relate it to phytoplankton abundance and rapid changes of f-ratios. Echotag acoustic sensors on the moorings resolve zooplankton and fish, permitting detection of responses to changes in habitat conditions. Spray glider-based observations have revealed the importance of biophysical frontal systems, which are typically regions of abrupt changes (and often local increases) in phytoplankton Chl-a and zooplankton acoustic backscatter. Glider studies have also uncovered regions of locally elevated mixing that may affect nutrient availability.
As climate variability and climate change are expected to alter the statistical distributions of such events (i.e., their magnitude, frequency, and duration), it is increasingly important to incorporate event-scale phenomena into forecasts of the California Current Ecosystem.