Category Archives: research

NOAA to move research ships to Newport

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RV Bell M. Shimada

RV Bell M. Shimada

NEWPORT – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this morning that Newport will be the home of the agency’s Marine Operations Center-Pacific beginning in 2011.

The federal agency chose Newport over bids from Seattle – where four of NOAA’s 10 Pacific research vessels are now based – as well as Bellingham and Port Angeles, WA. The deal awaits signing of a 20-year lease with the Port of Newport.

“This is huge,” Ginny Goblirsch, Port of Newport commissioner and Sea Grant Extension agent emeritus, told the Oregonian. “It means everything. It’s like $400 million over the next 20 years to the community and state. ”

The move is expected bring to Newport approximately 175 NOAA employees, including more than 110 officers and crew assigned to the NOAA ships McArthur II, Miller Freeman, Rainier and Bell M. Shimada, a new fisheries survey vessel expected to join the research fleet in 2010.

The agency went through an extensive public process before deciding where to locate the facility. According to an agency press release, considerations in site selection included NOAA’s infrastructure needs, proximity to maritime industry resources and NOAA labs, quality of life for employees, the ability to meet the desired occupancy date of July 2011, when the agency’s Seattle lease expires.

The federal agency’s vessels are used to conduct research and gather data about the world’s oceans and atmosphere. Newport and OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center are already home to NOAA’s VENTS program, which conducts research on the impacts and consequences of submarine volcanoes and hydrothermal venting on the global ocean.

(NOAA is the parent agency of Sea Grant programs in Oregon, Washington and other coastal and Great Lakes states.)

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Bacterial pollution affects Oregon beaches

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Oregon’s beaches are relatively clean by national standards, but they show sporadic hot spots of bacterial pollution at some popular destinations.

So concludes a study led by Oregon Sea Grant Extension agent Frank Burris.

“It’s definitely human-related,” Burris said. “It’s a significant problem. It’s really Oregon’s biggest beach problem.”

Read the entire article.

Oregon Sea Grant’s Rob Emanuel, writing in his own blog, offers some tips for coastal visitors and property owners for reducing their contribution to the problem.

Sciencepub: Catch of the Day

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Science Pub

Cold beer and fresh seafood are a natural summer combination in Oregon – but while the fish may be fresh, is it sustainable?

Join OSU researcher Selina Heppell at the July13 edition of Science Pub Corvallis to learn more about the fish we eat, where it comes from, and how fishing and management practices can affect the ocean ecosystems where fish live.

Heppell, an associate professor in the OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and a member of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council, studies fishing communities, commercial fisheries and efforts to make fishing more ecologically sustainable. With support from Oregon Sea Grant, she’s currently looking at the live fish fishery – where fish are caught and transported live to high-end restaurants to assure optimum freshness – and whether rules requiring fishermen to release pregnant females might serve as a conservation tool.

Science Pub Corvallis, a collaboration of OSU, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and the Downtown Corvallis Association , takes place the second Monday of each month from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Old World Deli/Brewpub on 2nd St. There is no admission charge.

West Coast research needs report is online

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The efforts of three years and  people in three states have culminated in the release this week of a new report detailing the major regional marine research and information needs of Oregon, Washington and California.

West Coast Regional Marine Research and Information Needs, produced by the four Sea Grant programs in the three West Coast states, grew out of three years public meetings, surveys and analysis. More than 1,000 stakeholders, representing community, business, research and agency interests, took part in identifying those needs.

Sea Grant collaborators analyzed thousands of stakeholder comments and sorted the needs into eight categories:

  • Vitality of Coastal Communities and Maritime Operations
  • Ocean and Coastal Governance and Management of Multiple Uses
  • Fisheries and Aquaculture
  • Marine Ecosystem Structure and Function
  • Ocean Health and Stressors
  • Physical Ocean Processes, Related Climate Change, and Physical Coastal Hazards
  • Water Quality and Pollution
  • Resilience and Adaptability to Hazards and Climate Change

Cutting across those topics are three themes:  climate change, marine education and literacy, and access to information and data.

The project, funded by NOAA as part of a nationwide effort to identify and set priorities for future research, is closely aligned with the West Coast Governors’ Agreement on Ocean Health.

Read more and download a copy of the report …

Documentary Preview: Dan Cox

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Dan Cox is the director for the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab at Oregon State University.  This bonus footage was recorded for the film Reaching Higher Ground: Oregon Sea Grant’s Tsunami Research and Community Engagement, which has been released to DVD and is available to view for free online.  In this short video clip (which does not appear in the film), Cox explains why the city of Seaside was chosen for developing a 1:50 scale model to flood repeatedly with scale-size tsunami waves.  You can learn more about the project here.

Transcript is available at above link

Crabbers collaborate with OSU researchers to monitor ocean temperature, hypoxia

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launching a crabpot with a sensor attachedCORVALLIS, Ore. – In a unique, symbiotic relationship, Oregon crabbers are working with Oregon State University researchers funded by Oregon Sea Grant to use their crab pots as underwater monitoring stations where data collectors attached to the pots gather vital oceanographic information.

This information might help crabbers more effectively locate their catch while helping scientists provide answers to challenging research questions, such as why and when hypoxia zones form in coastal waters.

(Read more …)

Documentary Preview: Michael Harte

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In this preview to an upcoming documentary featuring Climate Change in Oregon, Michael Harte (Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, or COAS) explains that the effects of global climate change on our day-to-day lives are not necessarily the effects talked about in the larger discussion of climate change.

The documentary, scheduled for release this summer, will feature interviews with researchers that are already identifying effects on Oregon’s coast linked to climate change.  Part of the film will include recent research findings by Jack Barth (COAS) who discusses how local salmon are affected by changes in ocean conditions.  Sea Grant Extension agent, Robert Emmanuel, will describe recent increases in flooding in Tillamook, and Nathan Mantua, from the University of Washington, will talk about the effects of increasing winter storm activity.

Transcript is available at the above link

Oregon Sea Grant fellow studies effects of jellyfish off Oregon coast

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lanayafitzgerald2The numbers of jellyfish in the Pacific Ocean have been increasing dramatically over the past few years, and scientists are concerned. Why? Because jellyfish eat certain fish larvae—which not only reduces the numbers of those fish but puts jellyfish in direct competition with other predators. Further, jellyfish can thrive in low-oxygen (hypoxic) waters, giving them an added advantage for survival.

Oregon State University (OSU) student Lanaya Fitzgerald, a fellow in Oregon Sea Grant’s Undergraduate Marine Research Fellowship Program, has been conducting research to determine the effects of one particular species of jellyfish—the sea nettle—on fish larvae off the Oregon coast. Her research indicates that sea nettles do, indeed, have a voracious appetite for several commercially important fish species, including Pacific cod, Pacific tomcod, and walleye pollock.

Fitzgerald’s work with jellyfish began in 2008, when she participated in a National Science Foundation-sponsored program called “Research Experience for Undergraduates” at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC), with mentors Ric Brodeur and Tom Hurst of NOAA. Co-mentor Bill Hanshumaker of HMSC helped supervise her Sea Grant fellowship. In early May of this year, Fitzgerald presented a poster highlighting some of the results of her research at OSU’s “Celebrating Undergraduate Excellence” symposium (see photo). On Saturday, June 27, her work will come full circle with a presentation (including some live jellyfish and fish larvae) at HMSC’s annual Seafest, in Newport, Oregon.

For more information, contact Ms. Fitzgerald at fitzgela@onid.orst.edu.

Exploring Beach Recovery

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In the Hinsdale Wave Research Lab at Oregon State University, Associate Professor Tuba Ozkan-Haller studies how beaches recover after winter storms.  The hope is that this information will go into predictive models that can help developers make smart decisions about how to protect properties or infrastructure along coastlines.  “People who have lived near the coast know that in the summertime the dry beach actually increases,” says Ozkan-Haller.  “There’s more sand that is just sitting on the dry beach area in the summertime. And that sand actually goes away in the wintertime because of the storms and forms a bar, sort of a submerged island offshore. It’s the way that the beach protects itself…. as the summer then approaches again during springtime, waves move that bar, that mound, back onto the beach. And, we found out that we’re actually very bad at predicting how that happens.”

She is joined by civil engineering professor Merrick Haller, who describes how the instrumentation is used to interpret the data.  After the data is analyzed, they hope to build numerical models that will help predict what will happen to the beaches after severe storms, and whether there will be increased need for protective structures or beach nourishment.

View Transcript

New Oregon Sea Grant publication explores offshore aquaculture

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Offshore Aquaculture book cover

Offshore aquaculture — the cultivation of fish and shellfish in the open ocean — has been practiced successfully for years in coastal waters around the world. However, offshore aquaculture is sparse in the United States and nonexistent in the Pacific Northwest, and the resulting seafood trade deficit is costing us billions of dollars per year.

So says a new publication from Oregon Sea Grant, Offshore Aquaculture in the Pacific Northwest, edited by Oregon State University fisheries professor Chris Langdon.

“The United States is far from sufficient in meeting its demands for seafood,” Langdon says. “Forty-five percent of our wild fish stocks are overfished, and we import about 80 percent of our seafood from other countries, at an annual cost of $13 billion. Clearly there is a need to develop additional sources of seafood.”

Offshore aquaculture may eventually prove to be one of those sources.

With support from NOAA and other federal and state agencies, Langdon says, offshore aquaculture projects have been established in a few regions of the United States. However, no such projects have been established in the Pacific Northwest.

Thus, last fall Langdon invited representatives of state and federal agencies, the media, research institutions, and coastal and fishing communities to Newport, Oregon, to evaluate the potential of offshore aquaculture in this region. Offshore Aquaculture in the Pacific Northwest presents the results of that forum, including recommendations for next steps in the discussion.

Copies of the 24-page publication may be downloaded at no charge from http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/sgpubs/onlinepubs.html#w08001, or purchased for $3.50 each plus shipping from Sea Grant Communications, 541-737-4849.

In addition, individual papers and presentations from Langdon’s offshore aquaculture forum are available as PDF documents and streaming video at http://oregonstate.edu/conferences/aquaculture2008.