This is the fifth 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.

Header image: Pseudo-nitzschia australis isolated during the massive 2015 toxic diatom bloom along the U.S. West Coast. Credit: Charles Wingert, Cochlan Phytoplankton Ecophysiology Laboratory, SFSU

For Grant Downie, a commercial urchin diver based in Fort Bragg, California, the local seascape poses a counterintuitive problem: Lately, there are too many urchins growing here.

It’s not just Fort Bragg. Much of California’s coast is marked by “urchin barrens,” sites where urchins have grown so abundant that they’ve destroyed kelp forests. Rather than starve, though, the urchins persist — alive still, but, since they’re lacking nutrients, empty of the uni that Downie and other divers harvest.

The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) may not be as well known as some other subdivisions of the executive branch of the U.S. government that focus on the environment — the Environmental Protection Agency, say, or the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. Still, the CEQ wields substantial oversight, says De’Marcus Robinson, who, as a John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellow, spent 2023 working with the agency.

When Rachael Ryan went to the Lagunitas Creek watershed in Marin County in the summer of 2021, she felt dejected. The river basin, roughly an hour north of San Francisco, shelters one of the largest and most stable remaining wild populations of endangered coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) along the Central California coast. But after another year with too little rain “there were all these fish trapped in tributaries and pools that were drying up,” Ryan recalls. “It was sad to watch in real time how drought impacted these fish.”

Mariska Obedzinski, a Sea Grant Extension Specialist dedicated to salmon recovery efforts, has been honored with the Golden Pipe Award for her team’s contributions to the advancement of salmon monitoring in California. This recognition serves as a testament to her team’s tireless commitment and innovative approaches to helping conserve these iconic fish species.

In late 2022, the federal government held an auction in which dozens of companies competed to snap up leases on offshore waters. They were seeking rights to develop floating offshore wind farms, considered a crucial component of California’s ambitious plans to reduce its carbon emissions. The auction included two sites spanning 206 square miles that lie twenty miles off Humboldt Bay — a mostly quiet, rural region that, within a few years, may become home to floating wind farms that produce enough power to 600,000 homes each year.