Coastal & Marine Conservation

Though the global economy has accelerated the process in recent decades by the sheer volume of ships, most from Asia, entering West Coast ports, the marine invasion has been in full swing since 1869, when the transcontinental railroad brought the first shipment of East Coast oysters packed in seaweed and mud to San Francisco, said Andrew Cohen, director of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions in Richmond, Calif. For nearly a century before then, ships sailing up the coast carried barnacles and seaweeds. Read the full story

The prime culprit in all this is the green crab. And as Brian Beal explains, green crab populations can be hard to control. He's professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine in Machias. "Nobody really eats them and that's the problem," Beal says. "They're just so highly fecund, they have lots of eggs, there's no real predator that can keep them in check." Listen to the full story

The necessity of a top-down National Ocean Policy is that it instructs managers to work in collaboration across managerial boundaries. The wonder of the National Ocean Policy was for leadership of the Interior (the National Park Service), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Coast Guard and the Navy to announce that they would work together across institutional boundaries, share resources, reduce redundancies, and develop more robust solutions for responsible ocean stewardship.

We are pleased to let you know about a new report, Monitoring Climate Effects in Temperate Marine Ecosystems: A Test Case Using California’s MPAs, which outlines a new and innovative framework for measuring climate change effects and informing adaptive MPA management.