US GLOBEC biological and physical studies of plankton, fish and higher trophic level production, distribution, and variability in the northeast Pacific

摘要

Investigations in the US GLOBEC (GLOBal Ocean ECosystems Dynamics) Northeast Pacific (NEP) program began in 1997 to investigate how large-scale climate change and shorter-term variability impacts the productivity of coastal marine ecosystems, the distributions and abundances of plankton, and the important fishery resources that rely on these ecosystems for at least a part of their life history. The NEP was selected as a region of study for many reasons, but especially because of the important regional fisheries, as well as the preponderance of evidence suggesting that it experiences and responds strongly to interannual and interdecadal variability in ocean conditions (Batchelder and Powell, 2002; Strub et al, 2002). During the planning of the NEP program, it became clear that the southern realm of the eastern North Pacific (hereafter the California Current System or CCS) and the northern realm of the eastern North Pacific (hereafter the Coastal Gulf of Alaska, or CGOA) are linked through ocean and atmosphere processes on annual, interannual and interdecadal scales. Thus, an integrated program of observations, modeling, retrospective and monitoring studies' was designed to enable comparison of the two regions. The goals of the US GLOBEC NEP program are discussed in detail elsewhere (Batchelder and Powell, 2002; Strub et al., 2002; US GLOBEC, 1996), with more specifics for the CCS and CGOA available from Batchelder et al. (2002) and Weingartner et al. (2002), respectively. Briefly, the core goals are to investigate (1) how the productivities of the CGOA and CCS covary as they respond to ocean and atmosphere forcing; (2) how mesoscale process and pattern at multiple trophic levels influence zooplankton biomass, production, composition, vital rates and transports; and (3) how interannual and interdecadal variability in physical forcing and ecosystem food web structure and dynamics influence juvenile salmon survival in the coastal ocean.