Mapping a patchwork quilt

This is the tenth in a yearlong series of stories showcasing the research that the Ocean Protection Council supported in partnership with California Sea Grant, with funding from Proposition 84.

In the two decades since researchers first coined the phrase “ocean acidification,” a loose network of scientists has assembled plenty of data about the problem. But their results are often siloed, spread across laboratory and government websites.

“We saw this fragmentation, basically,” says Tessa Hill, a marine geochemist at the University of California, Davis, explaining the genesis of a new collaboration. “There are a lot of people trying to monitor and observe the ocean, but not many trying to pull the whole picture together. We need time to put all of the data in one place.”

So, with funding from the Ocean Protection Council, Hill and an interdisciplinary team of researchers set out to map that bigger picture. “The Geography of Stress,” they called the project.

The researchers knew that conditions varied from place to place — that the ocean was a “patchwork quilt,” in the words of Kristy Kroeker, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and another of the primary investigators on the project. (The other co-PIs on the project are biologists Brian Gaylord and Eric Sanford, who, like Hill, are affiliated with the Bodega Marine Laboratory at UC Davis.) So the first step in the project was to help clarify the make-up of the quilt. 

The team focused on collecting just the datasets that were easily accessible. “We were not walking around the state begging people to share data with us,” Hill explains. “We were basically saying, ‘If your data are up, they go into synthesis.’ That's the criteria.” Still, the amount of data ready for the taking was staggering. The resulting database, which contains 13 million rows, took nearly four years to assemble.

“Unless you’re a MATLAB or an R programmer, you basically can't use it, because the data set is so huge,” Hill says. That’s why the team partnered with the Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System, which hosts the data.

With the data assembled, the team was able to map and visualize what they called “hot spots” and “cool spots” within five kilometers of California’s coastline — places that are more or less stressed by OA, high temperatures and hypoxia. The result is a much clearer picture of California’s oceans and the stresses they face than has been produced before. But this was just a starting point. “The database itself enables us to explore and answer questions that previously have been too onerous or impossible before,” says Melissa Ward, a marine scientist who, as a postdoctoral fellow at San Diego State University, worked on the project.

The Geography of Stress team wanted to consider how various biological taxa react to these stressors. This will yield what Hill calls a “megamap” — one that shows where key species might face particular risks. The focus was on economically and culturally important species: urchins, abalone, crabs, mussels and krill. The researchers were particularly interested in assessing the impacts of multiple stressors at once.

This portion of the project depended on laboratory studies to assess species’ reactions to changes in oxygen and pH. Most of these studies were already completed or were ongoing at the launch of the project, but Kroeker noticed a lack of data about Dungeness crabs. That prompted novel studies.

The team was able to leverage OPC’s initial investment to receive further funding from the Lenfest Ocean Program and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s Ocean Acidification Program, which expanded the scope of the project. This new funding went toward the final focus of the “Geography of Stress” project: the human reaction to these changes. The researchers interviewed nearly every aquaculture grower in California and Oregon about how they’re adapting to stressors. 

Growers, they found, tend to be worried about warming oceans and acidification. But they often lack the information they need to know what’s impacting their farms.

“Growers sometimes lose all of their shellfish in a given area, and they’re not sure why,” says Ward, who led the sociological research. “Is it the warmth of the water? Or the rainfall from a big storm? Datasets like this one can help tackle these questions”

The growers offered policy changes that might help the industry adapt. Many said they’d like to be able to switch to grow new species, but that the permitting process was often too onerous to make such changes viable. “While we need environmental protections, we need to allow farms to be flexible in the face of rapid ocean change,” Ward says.

Growers also highlighted the need for structures that promote networking connections, especially between the industry and scientists. However, finding the time for such discussions may be a challenge. Meetings and conferences “would be great,” one grower said in an interview for the study, “but I’m too busy just trying to do the day-to-day things on my farm.”

The layers of data the Geography of Stress team gathered — oceanographic, biological and sociological — together provide an unprecedented level of clarity about the conditions in California’s oceans. But there’s a second key takeaway, too: “There's so much we don't know still,” Hills says. “We actually are monitoring the ocean less than we were 10 years ago.”

Even California’s vaunted collection of marine protected areas (MPAs) — one of the most rigorously designed and protected such systems in the world — is not always well monitored, notes Sara Hamilton, a postdoctoral researcher with the Bodega Lab. There is an ebb and flow of funding for such programs, and it appears the tide is now going out. Hamilton thinks monitoring peaked in 2015. Now, out of the state’s 124 MPA sites, Hamilton found that only nine offered a significant amount of data about multiple stressors. This lack of data yields a different sort of map: the Geography of Stress project has revealed what areas state and federal agencies might want to target if they want a fuller picture of ocean stress.