MARINe is focused on understanding the health of rocky shores. Because these communities are highly diverse and change constantly, the only way to determine how they are doing is by studying the communities over a large area consistently for many years.
MARINe developed standardized field methods so that all the data can be compared over a large area and from year to year. MARINe incorporated “legacy data” (data that had been collected differently) into our shared database due to their value in establishing a long time series. The oldest data are in the Santa Barbara Channel; the Channel Islands National Park initiated sampling at the islands in the early 1980’s. The MARINe core surveys build on the protocol developed by the National Park Service.
