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NOAA Science Advisory Board
Meeting Comments to the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Science Advisory Board NOAA's Strategic Plan: Environmental Stewardship Goals and Scientific Research Thank you for the opportunity to comment on NOAA's Strategic Plan and scientific Research at NOAA. Marine Conservation Biology Institute (MCBI) is a nonprofit conservation organization dedicated to advancing the science of marine conservation biology to conserve marine species and ecosystems. We do this by holding multi-disciplinary scientific workshops on emerging marine conservation issues and by organizing the first Symposium on Marine Conservation Biology, held at the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in June, 1997. While MCBI welcomes the opportunities provided by NOAA at its annual constituent meetings to provide input into the Strategic Plan, a fundamental concern remains year after year: as currently structured, NOAA's Strategic Plan for Environmental Stewardship does not reflect the inherent cross-cutting nature of its goals, thereby ensuring that NOAA does not achieve any of them. NOAA's Strategic Plan is divided into 2 broad missions: (1) Environmental Assessment & Prediction and (2) Environmental Stewardship. The Environmental Stewardship mission is further divided into 3 goals: (a) Build Sustainable Fisheries; (b) Recover Protected Species; and (c) Sustain Healthy Coasts. Each of these areas is addressed separately in the Plan and in (concurrent) constituent meetings. Yet each of these Environmental Stewardship goals is intimately related to the others. Ecologists, conservation biologists, and most lay people recognize that intact functioning healthy marine ecosystems include the commercially important fish species targeted in goal (a), the endangered and threatened species addressed in goal (b), and NOAA's myriad other resource management mandates wrapped up in goal (c). Strategies for achieving these goals cannot be discussed in isolation from one another. A holistic approach is needed that integrates the strategies, so that the overall plan is mutually reinforcing. Regrettably, there continues to be virtually no evidence of integration in NOAA's Strategic Plan. One way to improve integration is to link management goals through the common scientific foundation necessary to achieve them. An overaching research program in marine conservation biology, designed to understand marine species and ecosystems in a comprehensive fashion across a broad span of geographic and temporal scales that examines how to protect, restore, and sustainably use them, would be a vital link among all of NOAA's Environmental Stewardship goals. Approaching these goals from an integrated, multidisciplinary research program would help reveal the interrelations among them and provide a more comprehensive basis for management decisions. For example, fisheries research on stock assessments to improve predictions of allowable catch should not occur in isolation from research on the needs of resident endangered species or from coastal management activities. Such a situation can lead to dismaying results like those revealed by Dr. James Estes and colleagues at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the journal Science in October, 1998. Dr. Estes traced a dramatic decline in sea otters off the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to increased predation by killer whales. Killer whales normally eat endangered Steller sea lions and harbor seals, but populations of these animals have declined significantly in recent years as well. A primary cause of their decline is believed to be heavy fishing of their preferred prey, such as ocean perch and herring. While these prey species may not have been overfished according to fisheries population models, they apparently were for the marine mammal community (which these models do not take into account). The ripple effects continued towards the shore: with a dramatic decline in sea otters - a keystone species - the sea urchin population skyrocketed from decreased predation. The unchecked sea urchins, in turn, demolished kelp forests along the coast. Dr. Estes anticipates that the loss of kelp forest will result in a decline in populations of fishes dependent on this habitat, and also coastal birds such as the bald eagle that rely on these fish for food. Hence fishery management activities, believed to be consistent with the Build Sustainable Fisheries goal, can, and do, undermine Recovering Protected Species and Sustaining Healthy Coasts goal when managers do not understand the ecological connections within ecosystems. The comprehensive marine conservation biology research we are proposing can generate information for this needed integration. There are likely many organization factors inhibiting communication and integrated management throughout NOAA that need to be addressed. Regardless of other organizational weaknesses, however, the underlying foundation for resource management decisions - research - must also be integrated. Marine conservation biology is a multidisciplinary science involving oceanographers, fisheries biologists, marine mammalogists, ichthyologists, ecologists, geneticists, social scientists, and others that focuses on questions of protecting, restoring, and sustainably using marine biological diversity. This new science provides an integrated approach to marine conservation questions. MCBI urges NOAA to establish an extramural research program in marine conservation biology that can provide more thorough information on managing marine ecosystems, as we outlined in previous comments to the Science Advisory Board (July, 1998). A successful approach to establishing such a program could involve partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF is the premier agency for scientific research, but traditionally has not viewed its mission as supporting applied research to solve conservation problems. Moreover, its focus on longstanding single disciplines does not promote new, multidisciplinary sciences such as marine conservation biology. However, NSF has been a successful partner with NOAA on several important conservation and management research endeavors, including ECOHAB (to study the causes and consequences of harmful algal blooms) and GLOBEC (to study how physical factors influence fisheries). These programs can help guide the establishment of a general program in marine conservation biology in partnership with NSF. As the 20th Century draws to a close the world's marine species and ecosystems are declining at an unprecedented rate. Clearly NOAA's current approaches aren't working. As the participation of more than 1,000 scientists at the first Symposium on Marine Conservation Biology demonstrates, the wave of the future in understanding and conserving marine life is multidisciplinary research to examine complex questions that transcend the boundaries of traditional disciplines. NOAA should provide this new science the support it needs to address growing problems into the new millennium. MCBI is ready to work with NOAA and the Science Advisory Board of effective and creative ways to make that happen. Thank you, |