Project Title
Salmon, Seabirds, and Seals: Ecological Complexity and Climate Change Structure Gulf of Alaska Ecosystem Dynamics
 

Proposal Summary
The North Pacific Research Board's Integrated Ecosystem Research Program in the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) addresses the overarching question: "How do environmental and anthropogenic processes, including climate change, affect various trophic levels and dynamic linkages among trophic levels, with particular emphasis on fish and fisheries, marine mammals and seabirds within the Gulf of Alaska?"  Proposed work addresses the upper trophic level component of this Program.  Pacific salmon are the most economically, ecologically, and culturally important species of fish in the Gulf of Alaska (GOA).  Our goal is to determine and quantify processes driving ocean production (biomass) of Pacific salmon, seabirds and fur seals.  We hypothesize that atmospheric and oceanic circulation drives winter carrying capacity of salmon and trophically-linked species in the GOA through density-dependent processes, which in turn drive salmonid brood-year strength/recruitment, seabird community structure, and fur seal population dynamics.  A suite of approaches will be used to investigate this premise, including wintertime surveys of salmonids, seabirds, and seals and their food webs, process studies on population, community, and habitat structure, and retrospective and comparative analyses with existing datasets.  Modeling will be used to experimentally explore how ocean ecosystem processes, management scenarios, and conservation issues (including climate change) can affect ecosystem dynamics.  This integrated ecosystem approach will provide managers and policy makers with new decision-support tools to plan for the future.  The proposed work involves collaboration by an international team of university, governments, and private-sector scientists.