Oregon Sea Grant’s early involvement with a pilot project to retrieve lost crab pots helped lay the groundwork for a $699,000 NOAA grant that will hire commercial fishermen to clean up 180 metric tons of abandoned gear off the Oregon coast.

The 2009 Gear Retrieval Project, announced last week by NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco during a visit to Newport, will employ fishermen during the off-season. Working with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the fishermen will locate and remove discarded crab pots, fishing nets and other marine debris that can  trap and kill marine mammals and fish and endanger fishing activities.

In 2006, Sea Grant collaborated with commerical fishing groups and the Oregon Crab Commission to test whether local fishermen could effectively locate and retrieve lost crab pots. In their first two test runs, fishermen found and hauled in nearly 60 crab pots and more than 600 feet of abandoned trawl cable.

The new gear retrieval project is among $7 million in coastal habitat restoration projects NOAA is funding in Oregon under the  American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Read more about NOAA’s stimulus act projects here.

El Niño, or the southern oscillation, is a climate phenomenon that occurs every two to five years and has significant effects on global weather, ocean conditions and marine fisheries. While its relative frequency makes El Niño among the most-studied and better-understood large-scale phenomena among climate scientists, it can be a mystery to the rest of us.

Oregon Sea Grant can help unravel that mystery through its short publication, El Niño. Profusely illustrated and written for lay audiences, the eight-page, color publication explains how ocean currents, wind and weather patterns come together in the Equatorial Pacific to create El Niño conditions that affect weather and fisheries from South America to Alaska.

El Niño can be downloaded free of charge from the Oregon Sea Grant Web site:

• Download fully illustrated color .pdf
• Download plain-text version

For more in-depth information, visit NOAA’s El Niño page.

“The ocean is coming up, higher than it ever has. The climate is changing. The ocean water is warm, a lot warmer,” warns Timothy Pellerin, Emergency Management Agency, Lincoln County, Maine. Building a Resilient Coast addresses the concerns and interests of coastal Maine residents. The hour-long documentary highlights key climate change issues including public perception and the need to protect both private and public property from millions of dollars of future storm damage. The one-hour program was produced by Oregon Sea Grant as part of a NOAA-funded project with Maine Sea Grant.

Twelve short excerpts from the documentary can be found on the Sea Grant Web site.

They present “take home” messages and insights. The documentary focuses on coastal residents who are “being the change” that the circumstances warrant. For example, homeowner Dee Brown built her shoreline house on piers to withstand a rising sea and what she rightly calls, “terrible storms.”

In addition, On the Lookout for Aquatic Invaders won an Award of Excellence (first prize in its category, “Environmental Design and Illustration-Special Publications”) in the 2009 ECO Awards, “a competition recognizing and honoring excellence in the environmental communications field,” sponsored by Global Environmental Communications, LLC. This publication was developed by Scott Wiedemer and Sam Chan, edited by Rick Cooper, and designed by Stefania Padalino and Patricia Andersson. You can view an excerpt of the publication at http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/themes/invasives/index.html#onthelookout

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 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 …

NEWPORT  - Hands-on activities, displays, food and fun for the whole family come together on June 27 in the seventh annual SeaFest at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center.

The day-long event, starting at 10 a.m.,  offers visitors a chance to go behind the scenes to see the labs and meet the scientists who study marine life, explore the bottom of the sea, and track whales across the world’s oceans.

A wide range of exhibitors, food vendors, live music, and activities for kids are all part of the annual event. Visitors can watch the Hatfield center’s resident giant Pacific octopus, “Amigo,”  devour a live crab during the noontime feeding, or get their hands wet inspecting sea stars, anemones, fish and sea urchins in the touch pools that simulate the rocky intertidal zone.

Read more …

The report, released yesterday by presidential science advisor John Holdren and NOAA director Jane Lubchenco, represents an unprecedented multi-agency summary of the science and the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. It focuses on climate change impacts in different regions of the U.S. - including the Pacific Northwest - and on various aspects of society and the economy.

“This report demonstrates that climate change is happening now, in our own backyard, and it affects the things that people care about,” Lubchenco said.

A printable .pdf fact sheet summarizes what the Northwest can expect from changing climate, including rising sea levels, further stresses on salmon and other coldwater fish, and reduced water supplies due to declining winter snow packs.

For more information about the scientific and cultural challenges posed by a changing climate, visit Oregon Sea Grant’s Climate Change page.

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Transcript is available at above link

The newspaper reports that the state Marine Board is focusing its efforts this summer on recreational boaters at popular places like Detroit Lake, where a new Clean Boater program is giving a free clean boating kit to any registered boat owners who fill out an environmental questionnaire and pledge. Several invasive species, including the voracious and fast-spreading zebra mussel, can be spread by boats being transported from infested waters to new locations.

The article cites a Sea Grant report released earlier this year, The Economics of Invasive Species, which found that cleaning and maintenance costs should zebra mussels find their way into the Columbia River hydropower dams could read $25.5 million a year, not including lost power-generation revenue.

Sea Grant offers free downloads of recent publications on invasive species, including:

• The Economics of Invasive Species - [.pdf][HTML]
• You Can Stop the Spread of Aquatic Invaders (teacher information brochure) - [.pdf] [HTML]

These and other titles are also available for purchase from our secure on-line store.

Read more about Sea Grant’s efforts to educate Oregonians about aquatic invaders.