BC Ocean Productivity Bioregionalization and Drivers of Change
About the Project
Project Lead: Christian Marchese Ph.d
The coastal oceans of British Columbia (BC) and Southeast (SE) Alaska are influenced by the interplay of different climatic and oceanographic processes. These regions, where freshwater and ocean waters interact, support diverse food-webs and determine the habitat available for various species of Pacific salmon, which are highly sensitive to changes in environmental conditions.
In recent years, Pacific salmon stocks have fallen below average levels, possibly due to a low prey availability for juvenile salmon caused by a mismatch with the timing of phytoplankton and zooplankton blooms. The latter have shown to be highly variable because influenced by a combination of environmental factors, such as ocean temperature. In this connection, the detection of biogeochemical provinces (also referred to as ecological provinces or bioregions) in the coastal oceans of BC and SE Alaska is key to improve our understanding of abiotic processes regulating phytoplankton dynamics and productivity, which in turn influence marine food web structure. Notwithstanding that, to date, no implementation of the biogeochemical provinces concept has been used at regional scale to capture the impact of changing environmental conditions along coastal oceans of British Columbia (BC) and Southeast (SE).
The project aims thus to provide an objectively and tailored bioregionalization of the BC and SE Alaska coastal waters, as a fundamental tool to assess marine ecosystem status and trends. More specifically, to obtain a finetuned discrimination of the environmental-biological interactions at sub-mesoscale, the project relies on the combined use of an unsupervised learning approach and high-spatial ocean measurement delivered by Sentinel-3. The recent Sentinel-3 mission will ensure the continuity of the developed classification scheme by providing long-term operational measurements. Besides, the implemented classification scheme to delineate provinces could be also used worldwide in similar types of coastal environments, facilitating further projects for marine living resources to arise.
