Project Background

The California Current System, stretching from southern British Columbia to Baja California and out 200 miles is one of 5 highly productive eastern boundary currents in the world.  The CCS is the “feeding trough” of the northern Pacific Ocean for millions of marine birds, mammals, and fish, including many far-ranging, highly-migratory species from the southern hemisphere.  Yet, overfishing, bycatch, habitat destruction, climate change, and pollution seriously threaten the health and productivity of this vital marine ecosystem.

Scientists, many management agencies, and some fisheries now recognize and promote the concept of marine protected areas* (MPAs) as an important and novel tool for the management and conservation of ocean biodiversity, fisheries, and marine ecological processes.  Many organizations and agencies are developing strategies and designs for spatially explicit MPAs along the West Coast. However, most of these efforts are focused on nearshore and rocky intertidal habitats.

In January 2002, PRBO Conservation Science established a multi-disciplinary “Pelagic Working Group” with 26 marine scientists and resource managers from the entire West Coast to explore the scientific rationale for offshore marine reserves in the CCS.  In its first meeting, we reached a consensus that offshore marine “hot spots” could be identified, and that these regions represented opportunities for enhanced conservation of the CCS.  These “hot spots” were acknowledged as especially critical refugia for predator populations during times of adverse ocean conditions (e.g., El Niño).

Identification of these “hot spots” can be difficult because of natural variability in ocean conditions.  However, marine birds, whales, sea turtles, seals and sea lions are conspicuous and abundant top-level marine predators and they aggregate at these sites to exploit high prey concentrations.  Thus, the design of MPAs to protect offshore and dynamic marine food webs, while representing a major challenge, can be addressed by using observations of top predators as “bio-indicators” of the health and production of spatially explicit oceanic realms.

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