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Marine Conservation Biology: New Science for A New Century Comments presented to the
Science Advisory Board of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) As NOAA approaches the 21st Century, it needs scientific information that reflects the most pressing problems and opportunities that we face. For decades, "ocean science" has been equated with oceanography, a science that typically relies on ships, submersibles, satellites and other sophisticated platforms to examine ocean circulation, chemistry, topography, and productivity. NOAA's other major marine scientific emphasis has been fisheries biology, a science in which scientists examine recruitment, mortality, growth and other population parameters of individual fish stocks in an effort to identify the maximum sustainable yield of target species. The information we obtain from these longstanding scientific disciplines has proved invaluable, but they are entirely insufficient for addressing the problems we are now facing in coastal management and marine conservation. Without significant change in NOAA's scientific emphasis, it will be ill-equipped to face present and future challenges. Today's challenges are numerous, complex and worrisome. Despite the information that fishery biologists generate, the United States and other nations are facing unprecedented declines in fisheries and sweeping changes in food webs; as you undoubtedly read in Science, Daniel Pauly has documented a worldwide decrease in trophic level of the world's fish catch. Alien marine species are invading ports worldwide, spreading along coastlines and often outcompeting and preying upon desirable native species. Algal blooms are increasing, and a Dead Zone the size of New Jersey appears in the Gulf of Mexico every summer. Pfiesteria and similar dinoflagellates are now plaguing coastal waters, threatening commercial fishers and the health of fishers as well. Recovery of endangered sea turtles and marine mammals remains elusive and disease outbreaks among them, and corals, abalone and sea urchins are becoming all-too-common occurrences. White abalone have completely failed to recover their populations two decades after their fishery collapsed and are now poised on the brink of extinction. Marine invertebrates and seaweeds once abundant in the cool waters of Monterey Bay have retreated northward, to be replaced by species from the south. And to protect marine species and ecosystems we are designating marine protected areas without understanding the key population processes that should be the basis for designation. In January, more than 1600 scientists called for answers…answers that oceanography and fishery biology alone are not configured to provide. Understanding the causes of and solutions to the marine management and conservation issues of the 21st Century requires a much more comprehensive look at the marine realm, an approach combines perspectives from diverse scientific disciplines including oceanography, fishery biology, marine ecology, biogeography, molecular genetics, ichthyology, marine mammalogy, toxicology, epidemiology, sociology and economics to answer key questions about protecting, restoring and sustainably using marine species and ecosystems. The birth of this new multidisciplinary field of marine conservation biology was celebrated at the First Symposium on Marine Conservation Biology at the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in June 1997 held in Victoria, British Columbia. At that meeting-which, remarkably, NOAA did not sponsor-more than 1000 marine scientists and conservation biologists attended 44 paper sessions on a wide variety of marine conservation topics including marine protected areas and reserves, conservation of coral reefs, invasions of alien species, the impacts of mobile fishing gear on the marine environment, and sustainability of fisheries. Conservation biology was born to fill a vacant niche: a science that addresses the world wide loss of marine biodiversity. NOAA supports some research that is marine conservation biology, but, unaccountably, ignores other topics no less important. If marine conservation biology is to generate information crucial for addressing the public's concerns in the next millennium, this new multidisciplinary science will need support not only within academia, but from the federal government. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds research that builds the foundation for solving our environmental, social and other problems. But it does not view its mission as supporting research to solve these problems and its focus on longstanding single disciplines does not promote new, multidisciplinary sciences such as marine conservation biology. Rather, it is NOAA-the federal agency with premier responsibility for managing our nation's coastal and ocean resources and a primary user of the information generated by marine conservation biology-that should be supporting research in marine conservation biology. The Coastal Ocean Program demonstrates that NOAA is capable of administering a successful peer-reviewed, extramural, multidisciplinary research program that examines important conservation and management question. This model should be substantially expanded, making NOAA the leading funder of marine conservation biology research in the USA. As I learned while doing the research for Global Marine Biological Diversity, the problems we are increasingly seeing in the marine realm are not species-specific or geographically isolated incidents occurring in a vacuum. Rapidly growing human populations on the coast and elsewhere, increasing trade, pollution, global climate change, and radically altered ecological communities all have interacting effects on the marine species and ecosystems. Sorting through these causes and effect requires a concerted effort by a community of marine conservation biologists dedicated to finding answers to these questions. As evidenced by the success of the Symposium on Marine Conservation Biology, the growing numbers of courses in this subject and the thousands of hits our world wide web site receives each month, this community of scientists is poised to move forward. But they cannot do so without substantial resources. At the same time, NOAA is challenged to meet its legislative mandates and public responsibilities for improved fisheries management, species protection, and more, but cannot without a more comprehensive understanding of marine ecosystems. Happily, there is an obvious fit here. By embracing the multidisciplinary approach of marine conservation biology and establishing a reliable source of funds, NOAA can foster the growth of high quality research on emerging marine conservation issues before they become crises, and thereby build a new marine science for the 21st Century. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss this with you. I would welcome the opportunity to work with the Science Advisory Board and others at NOAA to make this a reality. |