Wednesday May 27th from 9:30 -17:30 at the Long Marine Lab, University of California, Santa Cruz

Thursday May 28th from 8:30 -11:30 Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University

Objectives:

The aim of this workshop is to start the conversation about the value of integrating the existing data collected from different monitoring programs along the coast of the United States and Mexico. Particularly:

  1. Review MPA monitoring programs in the west coast of the US and Mexico.
  2. How to keep this monitoring programs going?
  3. What is at the minimal that we should invest to keep the monitoring happening?
  4. Prioritize and reconcile monitoring goals and questions:
    • Ecological communities response to environmental variability.
    • MPAs effects and functioning.
    • The reserves as a way to involve users.
  5. Only collect oceanographic data in MPAs and biological responses in fished areas
  6. Identify ecological attributes of coastal marine communities that are more susceptible to environmental drivers.
  7. Discuss the future of these programs.
  8. Adapted protocol for ecological monitoring temperate reefs at the US-Mexico scale.
  9. Create a multidisciplinary research and education consortium to conduct comparative studies.
  10. Generate a list of recommendations to enhance the scope and sustainability of monitoring programs adapted to temperate reefs.

First day

9:00 – Go over the agenda, anauncesments, etc. 9:00 – Overview and history of this project (PISCO, ReefCheck, COBI).

9:30 – 7 minutes presentations of the collective experience of monitoring MPAS. In seven minutes it needs to be addressed who, what, where and main results and data quality issues. Also what are the questions your monitoring program is trying to answer. Include a brief description of your most relevan results and what have you thought about or have implemented to make your monitoring program a sustainable endeavour (crowdsourcing, reduce effort, etc)?

  1. Fiorenza Micheli, Rodrigo Beas, Jorge Torre (Southern Baja)
  2. Guillermo Torres (Northen Baja)
  3. Matt Edwards (Baja, Alaska)
  4. Scott Hamilton (Southern California)
  5. Mark Carr, Pete Raimondi, Dan Malone (California, Oregon)
  6. Jan Freiwald (California)
  7. Rebecca Martone (Canada)
  8. Rodrigo Beas (Data integration into ecosystem models)

11:00 – Recapitulate objectives 11:30 – Identification of similarities and differences from all these monitoring programs

12:00 – Lunch or or going up to semminar.

14:00 – Clarify what is the most important things that we can do now that is new?

14:30 – What should be the goals of a regional (US-Baja) monitoring program? - Integration of monitoring information in practical decisions. - Useful and durable

15:00 – Design of protocols, indicators, frequency.

15:30 – Data issues, quality and repicability from the different monitoring programs.

16:00 – Sustainability of the programs (financial, training, analysis) for a very long time.

16:30 – To what extent we can coordinate different monitoring programs?

Second day

9:00 – Recap decisions made from the previous day

10:00 – Action plan, What do we want to do to follow up on this?

12:00 Adjourn