The management of the Pacific sardine is currently based on an environmental parameter, the surface temperature measured at the Scripps Pier. In the past sardine recruitment and Pier temperature were related. However, once current data on recruitment are included in the analysis no significant relationship between Pier temperature and recruitment are evident. We observed that Pier temperature and temperature in the primary sardine habitat have diverged over the last decades. Thus we explored relationships between temperature in the Southern California Bight and sardine recruitment.

Autonomous gliders traversing across shore sections of the California Current are powerful tools for continously measuring hydrographic properties, chlorophyll a fluorescence and acoustic backscatter (at 750kHz) in the CCE study area. Sharp fronts in hydrographic properties seem to co-occur with biological fronts assoctiated with chl a fluorescence and acoustic backscatter (which is a rough proxy for zoolankton biomass). This poster examines criteria for defining both physical and biological fronts as well as the strength of interaction between the fronts.

On the CCE Process Cruises in the California Current System, we used a Lagrangian sampling design to identify and track a series of discrete water parcels and entrained plankton communities through time.

The California Current System is a coastal upwelling biome, as found along the eastern margins of all major ocean basins. These are among the more productive ecosystems in the world ocean. The California Current Ecosystem (CCE) LTER site (centered on 32.9° N, 120.3° W) is investigating nonlinear transitions in the California Current coastal pelagic ecosystem, with particular attention to long-term forcing by a secular warming trend, multi-decadal oscillations (e.g., PDO and NPGO), and ENSO in altering the structure and dynamics of the pelagic ecosystem.

During May and June of 2006, the LTER CCE program launched a cruise off Point Conception closely following the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) line 80 and a valuable dataset was collected. These ocean variables include along-flow and cross-flow spatial gradients, vertical current shear, CTD and iron limitation.

 Experimental studies of phytoplankton growth and grazing processes were conducted in the California Current Ecosystem off Point Conception, California to test the hypothesis that growth and grazing losses determine, to first order, the local dynamics of phytoplankton in the upwelling circulation.

  A new Schoolyard children's book called Sea Secrets: Tiny Clues to a Big Mystery uncovers clues connecting the Cassin's Auklet from the California Current Ecosystem LTER and the Adelie penguin from Palmer Station LTER helping students understand that seabirds may be indicators of climate change.  

The MIRADA project was launched in the fall of 2007 to establish a Microbial Biodiversity Survey and Inventory across all 13 of the major aquatic (marine and freshwater) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites in the NSF US LTER Program. The long-term objective of our study is to document and describe baseline diversity and relative abundance data for both common and rare members of microbial communities and to relate this diversity to the underlying physical and chemical environment.

The marine microbial community, consisting of autotrophic and heterotrophic bacteria and protists (< 200 µm), is challenging to study due to its high diversity, various trophic functions, and poorly resolved taxonomy. However, the inherent property of organism size, determined by microscopical and flow cytometric techniques, can be used to develop population and community size spectra, which summarize large amounts of information into a simplified format.