Marine Fishes of the North Pacific

https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/government_posters/1059/thumbnail.jp

NOAA Updates What Defines Normal Temperature

Normal temperatures and precipitation levels for your area may have changed as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center recently released new 'normal' data for about 8,000 weather stations. The data defines the normal temperature at locations across the United States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and U.S. Pacific Islands. These data are used as a benchmark for weather forecasters to calculate day-to-day temperature and rainfall departures from typical levels and are also used by business, government and industry for planning, design and operations

Characterizing the Preferences and Values of US Recreational Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Anglers

The Atlantic Bluefin Tuna Thunnus thynnus is the target of a recreational fishery along the U.S. East Coast that is thought to be of considerable economic value. In some years, recreational landings have exceeded the sector’s annual subquota due to changes in fish availability, limited predictability of angler effort, and difficulties in realtime monitoring of catch. Understanding the drivers of angler behavior is critical for predicting how effort and harvest may vary as a function of changing fish availability, regulations, or costs. To investigate angler decision making, preferences, and values, we surveyed private recreational anglers from Maine to North Carolina and employed discrete choice experiments to determine how regulatory and nonregulatory trip-specific variables influence trip-taking behavior. A latent class-ranked log it model identified two distinct classes of anglers who exhibited differing preferences in regard to the importance of nonconsumptive aspects of Bluefin Tuna fishing (e.g., catch and release). Income and recent Bluefin Tuna targeting were the primary determinants of class membership, and higher-income anglers who had targeted Bluefin Tuna in the past 5 years were significantly more likely to be in the class that derives substantive benefits from nonconsumptive angling activities. An annual consumer surplus exceeding US$14 million was estimated for the 2015 fishery. We considered potential angler welfare impacts of possible management changes (compensating surplus) and identified a large amount of latent effort currently present in the fishery in the form of consumptive-oriented anglers. As a result, liberalization of harvest regulations could potentially lead to a large influx of effort into the fishery, which could impede the ability of managers to maintain harvest levels within prescribed limits

NOAA Goes Metric

https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/government_posters/1056/thumbnail.jp

Modeling effects of tidal and wave mixing on circulation and thermohaline structures in the Bering Sea: Process studies

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95183/1/jgrc11280.pd

Lake Mead nutrient enhancement project

The Lake Mead Fertilization Project is a research program designed to investigate the potential for using large-scale artificial fertilization to enhance the game fisheries of this reservoir through an increase in the population of threadfin shad, the system\u27s primary forage species. A substantial decline in the population of largemouth bass, together with poor condition of adult striped bass, are the two major issues affecting the Lake Mead game fisheries. Both issues have been hypothesized to be a result of an inadequate amount of forage in the reservoir. Previous studies have in turn suggested that a major factor limiting the shad population may be low productivity levels at the base of the food chain. Approximately 20,000 gallons of liquid ammonium polyphosphate were applied to about 20,000 acres of the Overton Arm in each of the years 1987 through 1989. The fertilizer was applied in late May or early June. Approximately 300 volunteer boats were used to distribute fertilizer in the early stages of the program; these were subsequently replaced with barge applications. A series of stations in both treatment and control areas was intensively sampled to document the impact of fertilization at various levels of the Lake Mead food chain. Fertilizer additions were designed to temporarily increase epilimnetic total phosphorus concentrations by approximately 20 ug/1 and chlorophyll concentrations by 5-10 ug/1. These increases were achieved, although there were substantial horizontal movements of the fertilized water mass, particularly in 1988. Chlorophyll concentrations peaked about 5 days following fertilization and returned to base-line levels within two weeks. Although maximum chlorophyll levels recorded were about 12 ug/1, thirty-day mean concentrations were below 5 ug/l at all stations. Fertilization produced few adverse water quality impacts and all these were short-lived. Water clarity exhibited temporary decreases at some stations in some years. Taste and odor and disinfection by-product formation potentials exhibited weak correlations with chlorophyll concentrations, but the increases were also short-lived. The fertilizer-induced algal production slightly increased the rate at which epilimnetic concentrations of inorganic nitrogen are typically depleted during the growing season in Lake Mead. The phytoplankton community displayed a complex response to fertilization, with some species clearly increasing their abundance and others showing little or no effect. The proportional abundance of blue-greens decreased following the fertilizer additions. Temporal patterns of algal primary production closely followed those of algal biomass. Size-fractionated production measurements demonstrated that most of the production was occurring in the 20-50 Mm size class, and that this pattern remained essentially unchanged as total production levels increased following fertilization. While interesting questions remain concerning the relative importance of resource levels and other factors, for example predation, in determining shad population abundance, fertilization of the Overton Arm, as undertaken during the present study, clearly did not lead to any obvious increase in shad abundance. While a longer-term research program might be able to separate resource-related variance in shad densities from other factors contributing to inter-annual population fluctuations, large-scale artificial fertilization on the scale employed in the present project does not appear to represent a useful management tool for the Lake Mead game fisheries

Ace's activity book : fun and facts relating to the ACE Basin Reserve

This activity book is a fun way to reinforce and enrich every student’s ACE Basin experience ... to instill a stronger awareness and respect for environmentalism and conservation, to broaden their knowledge of this area where they co-exist with a diversity of other life forms, and to encourage them to enjoy the adventure and discovery within Coastal South Carolina. These pages can also be used as coloring pages