Future Seas

A Physics-to-Fisheries Management Strategy Evaluation for the California Current System

Future Seas is a project exploring potential impacts of climate change on the swordfish, albacore, and Pacific sardine fisheries in the California Current System. A suite of dynamical, statistical, and conceptual models is being applied to explore future scenarios in an “end-to-end” framework spanning physical changes to socio-economic consequences, and to evaluate uncertainty associated with individual elements of the modeling framework.

Hawai'i Ecosystem Status Reports

Ecosystem Status Reports

2022 Ecosystem Status Report

This report summarizes the ecosystem across all of the main Hawaiian islands based on data and analyses that generally run through 2021.

Northeast Ecosystem Status Reports

Reports to the New England Fisheries Management Council

2025 New England State of the Ecosystem Report

This report summarizes the New England State of the Ecosystem based on data and analyses that generally run through 2024.

 

2024 New England State of the Ecosystem Report

This report summarizes the New England State of the Ecosystem based on data and analyses that generally run through 2023.

Newport Hydrographic Line

The Newport Hydrographic (Newport Line) is an oceanographic research survey conducted by NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center and Oregon State University scientists in the coastal waters off Newport, Oregon (Fig. 1).

Researchers have collected physical, chemical, and biological oceanographic metrics along the Newport Line every two weeks for over 20 years. This twenty-plus year dataset helps us to understand the connections between changes in ocean-climate and ecosystem structure and function in the California Current.

Stakeholders

There are multiple other manager and stakeholder entities with which regional programs have engaged with as part of inclusive community implementation of the IEA approach for specific management efforts.

These include but are not limited to:

State Management

The NOAA Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) program partners with several state natural resource management agencies to support their ecosystem-based management needs using the Integrated Ecosystem Assessment approach.

Below are each of the IEA regions working with state agencies:

National Marine Sanctuaries

IEA Approach Supports Science and Management needs for Sanctuaries

The NOAA Integrated Ecosystem Assessment program partners with NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries (ONMS) to support Ecosystem-Based Management using the Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) approach.

ONMS “serves as the trustee for a network of underwater parks encompassing more than 600,000 square miles of marine and Great Lakes waters”.

Evaluate Management Strategies

Evaluating management strategies is the fifth step of the NOAA Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) approach and builds off information from the previous steps. Management Strategy Evaluations (MSE) evaluate the potential outcomes of alternative management actions on ecosystem components (natural and human) and identify trade offs within management objectives. MSEs do not prescribe management approaches but rather inform managers which strategies could be the most useful in achieving their objectives.

Assess Risk

The fourth step in the NOAA Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) approach is to conduct a risk assessment. Risk assessments determine the probability of undesirable events occurring to the ecosystem components identified in the first step of the IEA. Risk is generally described by the sensitivity and/ or resilience of a given ecosystem component (measured by the indicators) to various natural and human pressures and perturbations (including management actions) that result in a change in the system.