Introduction to the Fisheries and the Surveys

Abstract

Fisheries oceanography of the California Current System is intimately linked to the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI). The current 75-station CalCOFI surveys cover the waters off southern California quarterly, and the full suite of CalCOFI measurements are made in this core area. NOAA Fisheries Service extends the sampling in the 113-station pattern to San Francisco in spring with more emphasis on trawl sampling. Since 2006, contingent on funding, NOAA fisheries conducts west coast-wide surveys from the Mexican to the Canadian borders with much more limited CalCOFI-type sampling and an evolving focus on acoustic-trawl survey. The rationale for CalCOFI has changed in its more than 60 year existence from a focus on understanding reasons for the collapse of the Pacific sardine fishery. The goal of the modern CalCOFI program can be broadly expressed as the understanding of long-term changes in the California Current System. The 66-station CalCOFI provides a consistent, accurate, multi-decadal oceanographic survey that now operates in an extraordinarily data rich environment. It has become a more broadly focused effort enhanced by relationships with ancillary programs. These include the NSF-funded Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, NOAA Fisheries stock assessment surveys for Pacific sardine, Pacific hake, rockfish, and salmon, the west coast-wide triennial NOAA protected resources survey, the Mexican IMECOCAL program covering Baja California, the Columbia River plume Pacific sardine survey, the Northeast Pacific line P transect, and individual transects sampled off Newport, Oregon, Trinidad Head and Monterey, California. Additional relevant data come from the Ocean Observing network, including glider transects, instrumented moorings, drifters, HF-radar, pier sampling, tide gauges and satellite remote sensing. The length of time series collected by these diverse sampling efforts ranges from 60+ years (since 1950) for the core 66-station CalCOFI pattern, to as few as 6 years (since 2008) for the new Trinidad Head line. The net result is an almost unparalleled wealth of data, perhaps surpassed only by efforts in the northeast and northwest Atlantic. CalCOFI data have been used in many hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, not including voluminous numbers of reports, in physical, biological, and fisheries oceanography, as well as in climatology, modeling, fisheries biology, and stock assessment. It is difficult to accurately quantify the value of CalCOFI simply because the program touches so many aspects of the understanding of the California Current System and how the system is changing with climatic and anthropogenic pressures.