COS 285-1 - Ecological model data view applications as decision-support tools for the long-term California MPA monitoring network

Abstract: The California marine protected areas (MPAs) network was established following the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act to improve sustainability of fisheries, conserve biodiversity and habitats, and enhance coastal economies. MPAs face many pressures, from resource use to climate variations and long-term change. These factors operate from local to global spatial scales over daily to decadal timescales. This wide range of variance in space and time presents serious challenges to understanding how ocean weather, climate, and ecological processes converge to shape MPA conditions. We built three Shiny applications in R: (1) Environmental and Biological Time Series, (2) Climate Change Risk Indicator, and (3) Ecological Models Visualizations. In the last application, Seascapes show that biogeochemical and oceanographic characteristics of MPAs clustered by bioregions, with more dynamic MPAs located in the Channel Islands and the Southern California coast. We explore the biological relevance of Seascapes within MPAs and show that the presence of specific Seascapes is correlated to kelp biomass and relevant to benthic community diversity. Moreover, California Harmful Algae Risk Mapping (C-HARM) shows that areas with predicted high concentration domoic acid events are larger and last longer in the northern and central coast than in southern California MPAs, but that over the last few years, these events are more frequent and occur for longer periods of time throughout the year. This talk will highlight work relating these two models with long-term ecosystem monitoring data as well as the uses of this work to inform policy in the upcoming California’s MPA network decadal assessment.