Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary

The Multicultural Education for Resource Issues Threatening Oceans (MERITO) is a multicultural education program partnered with Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. MERITO (which means ‘merit’ in Spanish) began implementation at CINMS in 2006 and delivers bilingual ocean conservation related products and services to students, teachers, adults, and families living near the Santa Barbara Channel region. A few MERITO program examples are the bilingual outreach program, MERITO internships, and the CINMS sponsored MERITO academy.

Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary visitor centers and exhibits display, promote and interpret the importance of the sanctuary and the resources it protects. Furthermore, the Channel Islands Naturalist Corps, is a group of specially trained volunteers dedicated to educating passengers on board whale watch vessels visiting the sanctuary and Channel Islands National Park.

Sanctuary staff work with the Sanctuary Education Team (SET), a working group of the Sanctuary Advisory Council, to identify target audiences, outreach tools, and delivery methods to communicate messages about the MPA network. Educational tools include: workshops for teachers and students, curriculum materials, signage and exhibits, multimedia products and adult education programs.

The sanctuary distributes brochures and pamphlets for the public covering topics such as boat safety, scuba diver safety and responsible whale watching to promote responsible use of the sanctuary. The official website also contains additional information such as a shipwreck database, an encyclopedia of species found within the sanctuary, and a marine mammal sightings database.

• Long term Monitoring Program and Experiential Training for Students is an environmental monitoring and education program for students, educators and volunteer groups throughout California to collect rocky intertidal and sandy beach data.
• MERITO Academy is multicultural education professional development program for 5-8th grade teachers which includes lesson plans, classroom visits and field trips.
• The NOAA California Bay Watershed Education and Training (B-WET) Program provides funds to support environment-based education throughout the watersheds of San Francisco Bay, Monterey Bay, and Santa Barbara Channel. Funded projects provide meaningful watershed educational experiences to students, teachers, and communities.
• The mission of NOAA’s Teacher at Sea (TAS) program is to give teachers a clearer insight into our ocean planet, a greater understanding of maritime work and studies, and to increase their level of environmental literacy by fostering an interdisciplinary research experience.

Within the sanctuary, there is a network of 13 state and federal marine reserves and conservation areas that provide additional protections to the ecosystem. This marine reserves network was established to protect whole ecosystems and restore ecosystem health. One possible effect of marine reserves is that they may provide ”spillover benefits” to areas outside the reserves. Sanctuary staff is currently conducting research on the effectiveness of marine reserves for community dynamics.[6] In one project, performed in collaboration with the Channel Islands National Park and colleagues at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby B.C., staff are evaluating the food web interactions expressed in the long-term, Kelp Forest Monitoring data set that the Channel Islands National Park has been collecting since 1984. That project has revealed that trophic relationships within MPAs are more robust, while outside MPAs these relationships are less so and the food web shows lower resilience and stability. In other work, with colleagues at the University of Auckland, they are examining potential competition between predators protected within MPAs (large fish and lobsters) and fishers who are targeting the prey of those predators (sea urchins). In addition, the sanctuary’s ongoing maintenance of a network of oceanographic sensors provides a data stream that can contribute to our understanding of larval transport and adult animal movement across MPA boundaries.

This satellite image shows the sea-water temperature variations around the Northern Channel Islands. Temperature ranges are: blue = 44–52° F, green-yellow = 56–64° F, and orange-red = 65–72° F. From west to east, the islands are: San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa.

Sanctuary staff are currently looking at how short term changes in climate can affect local conditions across large areas. Their work on the role of variability in jet stream trajectory and strength in determining seasonal variability in central Siberia allows a new and significantly more accurate ability to forecast the arrival of harsh winters several months in advance. This work has contributed to a better, more mechanistic understanding of the connectedness of climate processes across the Northern Hemisphere, from Siberia all the way to the US West Coast. More recently, they are looking at how these same processes manifest in long term data on winds along the Central and Southern California coast to see how climate variability signals can affect local winds in the Santa Barbara Channel area. Variation in wind strength has ecological effects by driving upwelling and also has a practical implication for local mariners: if climate change causes more windy days, there are fewer days for boating and fishing in the sanctuary. Additionally, the sanctuary’s ongoing maintenance of a network of moorings provides a continuous data series of oceanographic conditions in nearshore waters that is informing climate variability studies.

The Sanctuary Aerial Monitoring and Spatial Analysis Program (SAMSAP) is an ongoing long-term aerial monitoring program that collects data on vessel and visitor use patterns and cetacean populations within the sanctuary. SAMSAP has been active since 1997 and has been instrumental in providing vital data for management, research, and emergency response needs.

After populations of large whales were decimated by whaling in the last two centuries, several species are rebounding. Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary is a seasonal home to several species of those large whales. From Early Spring to late Fall the sanctuary sees increasing numbers of humpback, blue and fin whales- with seasonally migrating gray whales transiting the sanctuary on their trips between the North Pacific and the lagoons of Baja California. At times, large whales aggregate in tremendous numbers, with as many as 186 unique photo identifications occurring in a single day. Understanding the causes of this aggregation, such as bloom dynamics of the krill the whales feed on, can provide valuable forecasting information to predict where whales are likely to be in the near term.[7] This information in turn could aid in reducing whale-ship interactions. Ongoing work has focused on behavioral responses of large whales to close encounters with large vessels transiting the Santa Barbara Channel. This work is being extended to focus on two problems: how variability in krill depth is key to whale decision making, and how the whales are selecting specific sized prey within pools of mixed-age krill. To get after these questions, sanctuary staff and contractors are combining an ongoing program of tagging large whales with time-depth-location recording tags with systematic mapping of krill fields around the sanctuary. The sanctuary is assisting the work of partners from Cascadia Research Collective and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach is the largest commercial harbor on the west coast with over 6,500 vessels stopping each year. Much of that traffic passes the Santa Barbara Channel and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary on its way to ports around the Pacific Rim. These vessels are large, with some being over 1,000 feet long, and fast; they can travel at speeds over 20 knots. They also emit significant exhaust into the area and are the principal source of underwater noise in the sanctuary. To keep track of how these ships may affect the sanctuary staff have been building on a long-term program to monitor broad band acoustics in and around the sanctuary.[8] As a first step they are developing data management solutions with partners at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for two new data streams: broadband acoustic data and Automatic Identification System (AIS) data on ship travel. Although both sources of data were originally developed for other objectives—oceanographic research and safety at sea—these data streams provide valuable information for evaluation of spatial use patterns. For example, recent work evaluating California State air quality rulings on vessel fuel use demonstrated a major change in traffic patterns and emerging conflicts in use of the ocean by shipping and National Defense interests. Evaluating these data in the context of shifts of vessel traffic has also revealed quantitative relationships between economic indicators (numbers of ships and amount of cargo) and noise levels in the sanctuary.

The sanctuary contains a significant amount of deep water habitat: about 91.5% of the sanctuary is deeper than 100 ft. From depths of 100 ft to over 5,000 ft, deep water habitat experiences cold water, almost no light, and low oxygen, yet a variety of specially adapted animals such as corals, sponges, crabs, shrimp, fish, anemones, cucumbers, seastars, and worms reside here. In 2010, a NOAA expedition surveyed an underwater feature in the Footprint Marine Reserve to learn more about the abundance and distribution of coral and sponge habitat and to study the chemistry of the water in which these animals live.

The species listed below are categorized by Federal and California state government as endangered:

• White abalone
• Tidewater goby
• Blue whale
• Humpback whale
• Fin whale
• Sei whale
• Sperm whale
• California least tern
• Black abalone
• Leatherback sea turtle
• Green sea turtle

The species listed below are categorized by Federal and California state government as threatened:

• Scripps's murrelet
• Guadalupe murrelet
• Southern sea otter
• Canary rockfish
• Snowy plover
• Island Fox [11]

The species listed below are categorized by Federal and California state government as species of concern

• Copper rockfish
• Brown rockfish
• Pink abalone
• Bocaccio rockfish
• Ashy storm petrel

The species listed below are categorized by Federal and California state government as delisted

• Peregrine falcon
• Gray whale
• Brown pelican
• Bald eagle
• Steller sea lion