By Ian Rose
Fall/Winter 2024
So much of what makes the Pacific Northwest such a special place to live — the mild climate, the lush coastal environment, even the food — depends on a flow of water called the Northern California Current. This massive highway of water begins in British Columbia and flows over 3,000 miles south to Baja California. As the current delivers cool water from the north, wind driven upwelling brings colder, nutrient-rich water from the ocean depths up to the surface.
These forces combine to give us ocean temperatures up to 17 degrees Celsius (30° F) colder than the same latitude on the East Coast. Those nutrients give a boost to marine phytoplankton that feed whales, seals, seabirds and other wildlife, as well as the iconic seafood of the Oregon coast and the fishing communities that depend on them.
Along with natural year-to-year variability, climate change has the potential to alter currents and upwelling and the priceless services they provide all along the West Coast. OSU researchers are working to understand the past and present of this vital system, so everyone from fishing crews to Indigenous nations and coastal city planners can be as ready as possible for an uncertain future.
The Marine Biodiversity Observation Network, or MBON, is comprised of partnerships of experts and agencies across many regions of the U.S., working together to study ocean ecosystems more effectively. The Northern California Current MBON covers the coasts of the Pacific Northwest. At any one time, there are hundreds of researchers from different universities and agencies studying aspects of the current, from marine biologists tracking whale migrations to oceanographers studying the chemistry and geology of the ocean floor. Some of them have been collecting data for decades on their particular part of the system.
This summer, the Northern California Current MBON got a big boost from the federal government, in the form of a $1.75 million grant. The funds are part of a $16.7 million national marine technology innovation program funded through the Inflation Reduction Act. The grant will allow the network to continue to grow and develop to face the challenges of climate change in the coming decades.
“The MBONs were set up to integrate all those existing studies and augment them with either new techniques, new observational tools or new pipelines to get those data together,” says CEOAS Associate Professor Maria Kavanaugh, one of the lead scientists on the project.
Maria Kavanaugh
Those new tools range in scale from zooming in on the tiniest creatures in the sea to seeing the big picture, literally, from space.
Imaging FlowCytobots are camera systems that can take a sample of water and digitally record individual cells either in the lab or on a research vessel out at sea. Kavanaugh’s lab has two cytobots, nicknamed “Luci” and “Pandora.” Kavanaugh and her collaborators have put these instruments to work on projects like the Newport Hydrographic Line, a study of Oregon’s offshore oceanography, chemistry and biology that has been running for over 60 years. Samples that used to take weeks or months to analyze, long after a given research cruise was over, can now be studied immediately, right on the boat.
Environmental DNA techniques can tell what species have been swimming in a sample of water, even if they aren’t in the sample itself. That means that a vial of water could contain data about everything from bacteria and viruses to whales, a perfect example of the cross-disciplinary work that MBON was founded to do.
But water samples from a research cruise will always be snapshots of one specific time and place. For a wider look at the Northern California Current’s ecosystem, researchers are turning to a new NASA satellite called PACE (Plankton, Aerosols, Cloud, [ocean] Ecosystem), launched in February, that has the potential to be a gamechanger for marine monitoring. Kavanaugh is excited about the flood of data about to come from this new satellite.
“It’s allowing us to get that sort of information that we would only previously be able to see by poring for hours and hours over the microscope and spending countless days at sea. We can see it from space. So that’s a pretty cool thing.”
The ultimate goal of the network is not just scientific curiosity or the excitement of the newest technologies. The real goal is to be able to provide the people who work and depend on the ocean with the information they need.
The Northern California Current MBON did not yet exist in 2014-2016, when the marine heat wave known as “the blob” parked itself off of the Pacific coast and raised temperatures by up to 2.5 degrees Celsius. Lasting almost two years, it devastated marine ecosystems from Alaska to California. Marine heat waves are becoming more common and severe, just as they are on land. When the next one hits Northwest coasts, MBON researchers hope to have the technologies and relationships in place to help communities and industries adapt.
In addition to her work with the MBON, Kavanaugh runs the Seascape Ecology Lab at Oregon State. For several years, the lab has run a cooperative fisheries project, working with commercial fishing crews out of Newport and Winchester Bay.
The cooperative project is still small, but even with a few vessels in two ports, it establishes trust and communication between these two groups with a shared interest in understanding and protecting our coastal seas. Kavanaugh says that the key to these partnerships is open communication and mutual benefit.
“Ideally, we’ve got reciprocity, where we’re providing information that’s useful to them, and a means for frontline communities like fishermen and tribes to be more autonomous and effective in how they’re monitoring their own backyards.”
Read more of freelance writer Ian Rose’s work at ianrosewrites.com.
L to R: Odontella, Tintinnid, Asterionella, Dinophysis, & Dictyocha
Phytoplankton images captured by Kavanaugh’s Imaging FlowCytobot in the Northern California Current
