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The newly released Coastal Ecosystem Vulnerability Assessment (CEVA), funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, details the potential impacts of climate change to Santa Barbara County’s coastline ecosystems, especially beaches and wetlands. “If we value them, we have to make plans for them,” said Monique Myers, a California Sea Grant researcher who organized the study. “They are on the frontline of climate change.”
Today a deadly herpes virus, Ostreid herpesvirus 1 (OsHV-1), is threatening Pacific oysters (Crassostrea gigas), the world’s most popular and valuable oyster species. It is almost certain to spread more widely in our globally connected world.
Colleen Burge is currently funded by the NOAA Sea Grant Aquaculture Program and the UMBC-UMB Research and Innovation Partnership Grant Program for her work on OsHV-1. She has been funded in the past by California Sea Grant College Program and National Sea Grant.
Aquaculture (aquatic farming) accounts for just over half of all the seafood consumed worldwide.
After two years of analysis by our expert working group, we found that 3 percent of the world’s oceans appears very suitable for marine aquaculture. This may sound small, but it is actually an extraordinary amount of area, spread across nearly every coastal country in the world – about four million square miles.
Author Rebecca Gentry has received funding from California Sea Grant (R/AQ-134) and the Waitt Foundation
A Central Coast scientist has found that algae are resilient despite the effect of climate change on the ocean, which is good news for large sea snails known as abalone.
[California Sea Grant and] Cal Poly San Luis Obispo biologist Dr. Jennifer O’Leary took a closer look at ocean acidification, which is caused by climate change.
A cold, clear stream that provides some of the last refuge for wild coho salmon in Sonoma County lies at the center of a dispute over logging plans in the forested hills above Healdsburg. The proposed removal of redwood and Douglas fir trees from a steep hill above Felta Creek and the Russian River Valley poses a risk, opponents say, to remaining habitat for an endangered fish species once abundant in the freshwater streams and rivers of the North Coast.
“There were two years where Felta was the only stream in the entire Russian River watershed that we knew coho existed,” said Mariska Obedzinski, a fisheries biologist with the California Sea Grant program who specializes in endangered salmon recovery.
The recent article “Can the United States have its fish and eat it too?” published in Marine Policy describes some of the consequences of the US combining relatively well-managed domestic fisheries with significant imports of seafood from foreign fisheries, some of which have greater rates of overfishing, bycatch, and interactions with threatened species. Co-author Carrie Pomeroy is an extension specialist with California Sea Grant.