The upcoming Oregon State Seafloor Mapping Workshop and the dates for that event were discussed. Following a brief email poll, the best dates for the Workshop are March during the week of March 17. The group agreed that representatives of the wave energy groups should be invited, and also agreed that building on the momentum of the Washington Workshop and developing strategies for funding should be a significant part of the workshop.
The nomination of Marine Reserves sites has been pushed back until spring, allowing enough time for a number of key activities, including outreach to coastal communities and developing of relevant GIS layers. The State Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD), and the Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Lab (ATSML) at OSU are working to develop key GIS layers needed for the Marine Reserves process. Chris Goldfinger, Melinda Agapito Chris Romsos, and Keith Karageorge at OSU, Andy Lanier, a NOAA fellow at DLCD, Tanya Haddad, and Randy Dana at DLCD are working to create an interim habitat map for the Oregon Territorial Sea. While the high resolution mapping of the Territorial Sea lies in the future, an interim map of sufficient resolution to aid in the Marine Reserves process is possible with existing data. The mapping is based on the discovery of a previously unknown data source: 11,000 bottom samples taken over span of more than 100 years by the former Coast and Geodetic Survey (now NOAA NOS). These data, never digitized, were first discovered by Tanya Haddad, and then explored for their usefulness for an interim map. It soon became apparent that a major windfall of seafloor lithologic data existed in the NOS archives. Working together, the two labs rectified 71 high resolution scans of NOS “smooth sheets”, mid stage survey sheets from historical NOAA surveys. After rejecting some sheets that were clearly too old for accurate navigation, or were damaged, the remaining 71 sheets were digitized at OSU by MRM grad student Melinda Agapito, with QC done by Tanya Haddad and map rectification by Randy Dana. For perspective, previous seafloor samples available in the Oregon Territorial Sea numbered only about 100. Combined with a new bathymetric surface also utilizing the new data, a good quality habitat map is presently being constructed at OSU, and has become Mel Agapito’s MS thesis research. This map will be complete in March, in time for the Marine Reserves nomination and evaluation process. Development of the new Oregon Habitat Map, an essential component of the Marine Reserves process, is supported by the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Oregon State University, and the Nature Conservancy (Awards to the ATSML at OSU).
Also in progress is a series of upgrades to the PaCOOS/IOOS West Coast Habitat Server. This system is supported by NOAA, and is a node in the IOOS system. PaCOOS is the west coast component of this system, and focuses on the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem. The PaCOOS system is designed to deliver full resolution marine mapping data to a variety of users, and comprises a set of database interconnections between OSU and three NOAA labs in Seattle, Santa Cruz, and Stennis, Mississippi. The site has an interactive map server that delivers coast wide habitat maps, benthic sample data, sidescan sonar, bathymetry/topography, and other biologic, geologic, and physical oceanographic data. It allows for queries of arbitrary areas that return descriptive and tabular results for that area that show bottom types, fish species expected and their preferences for environmental factors. New development work will allow the PaCOOS system to be used as an evaluation tool for the Oregon Marine Reserves process, and a resource for those developing marine reserve proposals. These decision support developments include the ability to save and compare arbitrary polygon queries of biologic, habitat and other data. As the Marine Reserves process winnows the desired datasets to be used in the evaluation process (see below), these will be included in PaCOOS in their final form, and can be included in site studies during the evaluation. The system may be linked to analysis software such as Marxan for final evaluation. Check out the West Coast Habitat Server at: http://pacoos.coas.oregonstate.edu/.