Pacific waters off the West Coast showed improved productivity, says NOAA

Cooler temperatures created a robust environment for nutrient-rich plankton to proliferate.

Ocean waters off the West Coast showed signs of improved productivity in 2020 after several years of warm water and poor fisheries conditions, according to the most recent California Current Ecosystem status report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The transition last year from an El Nino to La Nina climate pattern, paired with a strong upwelling of cold water from the deep ocean, created ideal conditions for nutrient-rich plankton to proliferate, according to the report. These tiny organisms provided food for larger marine animals, and their abundance helped grow populations of fish, birds, and mammals such as sea lions higher up the food chain.

“It does look like there was better upwelling on average than we’ve seen in several years,” said Chris Harvey, a researcher with NOAA and co-editor of the report released in March. “We saw more plankton, and the plankton we saw were the cool-water varieties that have more stored fat — more food and better-quality food.”

The report was compiled by NOAA researchers and presented on March 10 to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, which manages commercial, tribal, and recreational fishing in federal waters off the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington. The council will use the report to better understand conditions within the whole ecosystem when making management decisions and recommendations in the future.

Looking at the status of the ecosystem holistically “helps the council avoid siloed decision-making,” said Kit Dahl, a staff officer at the council.

The council will use the report to inform forecasts for species like salmon, using data collected on parameters such as sea surface temperature to determine catch limits, said Chuck Tracy, executive director of the council.

The higher productivity seen in 2020 comes after a period of poorer conditions in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast.

“The previous five years, starting in early 2014, were very warm. We were seeing conditions that were not good for the fisheries,” said Toby Garfield, a researcher with NOAA and co-editor of the report.

“We’ve had some tough times in the last few years,” said Tracy. “For a lot of species, the cold water regime is favorable, so that’s encouraging.”

This is the ninth annual report compiled by researchers with NOAA Fisheries. Previous reports were presented to the council in 2012 and from 2014 to 2020. The report tracks the ocean conditions and fish stocks within the California Current that flows southward in the Pacific Ocean from British Columbia to Baja, California. This ecosystem is home to a diverse group of marine animals including salmon, crab, shrimp, sea lions, and whales, and also supports recreational and commercial industries up and down the entire West Coast.

Despite the cooler overall conditions, the report documented the second largest ever observed marine heat wave in the North Pacific, which formed far offshore in June 2020. But “it only came up near the coast for about a week,” said Garfield, so coastal fishes were not seriously affected.

The report also found that fishery revenues were down in 2020 compared with 2019, likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“A big impact was that the restaurants stopped buying fish,” said Garfield.

The COVID-19 pandemic also impacted NOAA researchers’ abilities to collect data for the report. NOAA ships directed at specific parts of the ecosystem “were tied up, and NOAA staff that normally go out to sea couldn’t go out to sea,” said Garfield. “We tried to recover some information from charter vessels and academic fleet.” The team also used satellite data, model data, information published by state health labs or federal agencies, and bird colony counts collected by nonprofits to get a sense of what was going on in the ecosystem.

“Surveys were canceled and reduced, and we had less time to pull everything together and effectively visualize the data and connect dots,” said Harvey. These challenges and potential holes make it harder to fully interpret the data they collect, he said. “These reports always have uncertainty in them, but this year (the pandemic) left a big mark on the report.”

NOAA researchers are working to incorporate new metrics of resilience for fisheries in future reports, Harvey said.

“For example, if a particular vessel fishes for Dungeness crab it might have to stop fishing for them for a period of time because the quality of crab isn’t good, or because of a harmful algal bloom or a whale entanglement,” he said. “It could be they have more resilience if they have other species to fall back on, in case that target species is not available.”

These metrics will help fisheries plan and prepare for any disruptions that might hit the industry in the future, Harvey said.

“It gives us some ideas of which communities and vessels are better prepared for the shocks like COVID that are to come.”