MICHELLE MCCLURE: Without further ado, I'm going to hand it up to Carol Stepien the head of our Ocean Environment Research Division who is going to give an overview for our marine ecosystems research theme. 

CAROL STEPIEN: Good morning, everybody. I'm Carol Stepien here as the Ocean Environment Research Division leader now for about 3 and 1/2 years. So the hiring of Chidong and I were some of the new things that happened after the last review. 

We both came from university careers. I left my distinguished professorship took my lab and [INAUDIBLE] to serve our nation's science here. And I've been thrilled to work with all of the scientists here in this room. So I'm going to be talking today at Acoustics, EcoFOCI, Ocean Acidification, and Genetics and Genomics. 

So yesterday Dave Butterfield talked about two of the groups that are also under my division now. So EOI and Tsunami. So it's kind of a weird set up in some ways. 

So PMEL marine ecosystem research has focused to meet the OAR strategic plan to measure, understand, and predict impacts on the oceanic web of life. So we focus on the US Pacific and Arctic coastal zones but we have implications across the world and our research is used in many, many ecosystems. 

So this meets NOAA's vision of healthy ecosystems, communities, and economies that are resilient in the face of change and we offer a diversity of scientific skills for the long-term benefit of our nation. 

We ask some major questions. Are our marine ecosystems changing which is the null hypothesis that was brought up yesterday? And we know it's changing, but how and why? What are the increasing anthropogenic influences? How does warming affect ecosystems? 

The term the "Blob" was coined here by Nick Bond from EcoFOCI. Melting ice. OK we know that Alaska and the Arctic are melting, unprecedented warm levels and the species and their distributions are changing. So here you see a tank of California sardines which were common during warm years and the classic oscillation between anchovies and sardines. 

But now up in Alaska and Arctic waters the pollock are moving North. The Pacific cod are in danger and so are the snow crab populations. So there's winners and losers in this ecological game of life. And so here at PMEL we are focusing on what is happening as these food chains increasingly are becoming out of sync. 

So how can we best detect, evaluate, and predict these growing influences? So here at PMEL we specialize in determining the background fluctuations versus new conditions. So what is an ecological signal versus the noise? We've known for our sustained observations we have capacity to do this that universities usually do not. 

So these sustained long-term observations from our shipboard expeditions and our moorings. We offer accurate modeling and ground-truthing. Going back to our observations in the marine ecosystems versus our models. And we embrace new technology. 

So this is a real hallmark of PMEL. So the new genomics, genetics, and bioinformatics as well as Acoustics, Saildrone, AUVs, sensors, and now artificial intelligence, and machine learning. And what are the effects though overall on our nation's and the world's resources? So this is a dilemma facing our science and facing our nation today. 

So you'll hear from many of our team members. We have great researchers here. I'm so excited to theoretically supervise people that publish in Nature and Science every other week. So it's exciting to be here these are some of the people that you will see on our panel. And we have a number of postdocs and graduate students who will be presenting posters. 

So you'll hear from Acoustics, EcoFOCI, Ocean Acidification, Alaskan Acidification, and our new Genetics and Genomics group. So the PMEL Acoustics group has been very innovative in capturing ambient noise in the ocean versus the noise that is man-made. And this is very disconcerting to me as a scientist. 

For example in 2017 Bob Dziak and his team won the Department of Commerce Silver Medal award. Because they had the first long-term records of ambient sound in the deepest area of the ocean at Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. And do you know what you could hear? The whales can hardly hear each other. You hear echoing in the canyons the sound of the ships. 

And so this is really goofing up our marine ecosystems. So this group they'll be presenting here also focuses on geophysics, ice-shelf, and sea-ice dynamics. Bioacoustics, how do you detect cause of endangered baleen whales to assess their population sizes and distributions? And Angie Sremba is going to be presenting her poster tonight one of our NRC post-doctoral fellows. 

And we also embrace new technologies in this. So this group is developing new hydrophones and oceanographic platforms. So the goal is to incorporate hydrophones into these mobile platforms to go deeper and quieter with microprocessors that can record faster and longer. 

Examples that we developed here and perfected at PMEL include the Slocum glider, the Sea Glider, Acoustic floats, seafloor hydrophones that work with modems to satellite buoys to detect killer whales. This winch mooring very innovative to record undersea ice somewhere our ships cannot go. This offers an ear in our ocean environment. 

So this is the Autonomous Hydrophone network. OK it has global reach. There are 27 geographic locations. We're very, very proud that this group won the 2019 NOAA Administrators' Award for the first comprehensive sound system sensing network across all US coasts. 

So moving on to EcoFOCI. This is a real success story of partnerships across line offices in NOAA. So this is the hallmark of this. So this has been a 30-year collaboration with Alaskan Fisheries Science Center providing the biology know-how and PMEL providing the physics and chemical parameters of this data. 

And so Phyllis Stabeno just won the NOAA Career Award. We had to nominate her three times for this and she won this year. We're very, very proud of her. She offers great mentorship to men and women alike in this laboratory and across Alaska. So she'll be presenting today. 

This embraces all kinds of connections. OK, they work with local Alaskan communities, fish acoustics and trawls, marine mammals, moorings taking data and hydrography, chlorophyll, nutrients, zooplankton, ichthyoplankton, and capturing the PMEL hallmark with our engineering and new technology and modeling. 

So the shipboard stations travel every year in several cruises. Some are part of the Alaskan Fisheries Science Center some are headed by PMEL. The ecosystem moorings have been in effect for 25 years or longer providing continuous data and an unprecedented record of these changes that are going on in Alaska and the Arctic. 

So to calibrate they take all these data and then turn it into models which then in turn inform predictions and information. So this is a very effective process synthesizing physics, chemistry, and what is going on in the plankton which I regard as the first responders to changes in the ocean. 

So we offered moored temperature measurements that show extreme warming in recent years and provide this important ecosystem implications. This is M2 down here. This is the longest continuously operating mooring so it's 25 years. 

It's affectionately known as Peggy named after the marine operator who called out to captains on the sea, weather reports. And so this is a strong legacy in the community. 

We also will be talking about M8 which is the Distributed Biological Observation part of that network. And they've been operating there for 15 years. So what have they found? OK, unprecedented warming. 

OK, the fish and the species are moving and the highest temperatures that M8 recorded extreme warming of bottom temperatures. They went above two degrees Celsius above the cold pool in 2016 but they reached the highest levels in 2018. 

M2 showed a similar trend which we'll also talk about here in 2018. So this is really sobering. As we speak the Arctic and Alaska is melting. So EcoFOCI embraces new biotechnology. These include the Prawler, the Pop-up buoy, Saildrone, and Oculus Coastal Glider developed here at PMEL. 

So the Oculus Glider goes up and down. Within 24 hours it offers observations that shipboards data cannot. The Bering Sea mission observed eddies that were not resolved by traditional shipboard sampling. So these include measurements of temperature shown here, salinity, and chlorophyll-a. So these are important ecosystem implications. 

The PMEL Carbon and Ocean Acidification group's mission is to lead Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network and the North American Hub and it's been fascinating to be a part of those ground-truthing observations. 

Dick Feely here is a new AAAS Fellow a couple of years ago. And it's been very inspiring that he provided the initial congressional testimony to bring ocean acidification to the attention of the world. 

So and he coordinates these huge networks across the world engaging the public and engaging stakeholders and communities like in Central America, South America, et cetera. He travels all over and just an amazing job here. So the goals are to document, understand and forecast acidification status and trends in coastal estuarine environments. 

And they use water column and surface carbon observations to do this. Both shipboard and mooring observations which is the hallmark of PMEL research. So combining these things. So variability and trends in OA include this tremendous seasonal and interannual variability in carbon system parameters. 

This is new work by Adrienne Sutton who is going to have a poster here. What this shows is this circle or the color of the circles is actually the amount of partial pressure carbon dioxide in the system. And you'll notice that in the Pacific Northwest, we have very, very high levels. 

The size of the circles are the seasonal amplitude. The thickness of the circles are the interannual variability. So the point of the numbers on this is time range. 

This is going to take a long time because of our natural fluctuations in the Salish Sea and along this coast because we have a lot of interannual variability and a lot of seasonal variability that is going to take a while to emerge how we can discern the signal from the noise and where it's going to rise above the trend to emergence. So this is very, very important new research results. 

So we've had several studies have shown that our [INAUDIBLE] industries are being severely affected by oysters, mussels and clams. The shells are dissolving and the local tribes are very concerned about this and industry is very, very concerned about this. 

So we already are at those levels. This shows new work done by our colleague Nina Bednarsek from Scripps now who was here at PMEL before. This is data that she just got from the 2016 West Coast Oceanographic cruise. We have a new campaign going on. We're very excited about the data that we will collect down there in 2018 or 2020. 

And this shows that the carapaces of dungeness crabs, the largest US West Coast fishery species, are dissolving too. So what does that mean? The crabs can't survive, they won't recruit, they won't grow, it's going to induce higher moulting as soon as you disturb the shell, et cetera. So this is very, very sobering to us. 

So the Alaskan Ocean Acidification team is a fairly new team. Jessica Cross and Darren Pilcher concentrate on determining the duration, intensity and extent of OA around Alaska. 

Our new Genetics and Genomics group which I head is focusing on determining and understanding the responses of marine communities in changing ecosystems using genetics and genomics. We work with all these groups. I'm getting low on time, so I'm going to go really quick. 

So we focus on many, many techniques which we'll tell about in our laboratory. And we're responsive to the new NOAA 'Omics Strategy. So Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet just brought out the new signed off pamphlet two weeks ago in Ocean Sciences meeting. And so it's really exciting to be a part of this and we've been involved in the implementation and actually the design of some of the strategy. 

So the research questions that we ask a lot in genetics and genomics are what species characterize marine communities? How do they differ amongst regions and habitats? What are their seasonal and annual patterns? 

And how do these relate to the chemical and physical changes and conditions that we're undergoing? How are the species in their biological communities responding to environmental parameters and changes? 

So our objective is to increase accuracy towards real-time assessment of responses by marine communities at low cost, low impact and sampling where the great white ships of NOAA cannot go which is the new horizon you'll see that across our PMEL sensored networks. So we have test bed ecosystems to the Northeast Pacific coast, Alaska, Arctic, and chemosynthetic communities which you'll hear about later. 

And we partner across NOAA labs, including AOML and GLERL. We then having lots and lots of meetings to coordinate how OAR is spending its money. So the overall objective is to determine species composition and diversity. 

Aiming to do this more efficiently, ID the species and the responses in communities and couple these with visual acoustic and chemical pheromone signals again with machine learning and artificial intelligence in the future. 

So how are we looking to the future for PMEL ocean ecosystem research? So we're offering a new blend of physical, chemical, and biological data measurements to discern anthropogenic effects. So evaluate signal from the noise. 

We're linking as Chidong pointed out yesterday the seafloor through the pelagic and atmosphere realms. So what are the linkages? This is a specialization of PMEL. And we're experiencing a great growth in our capacity for remote sensing, sampling, sensors, satellites, and machine learning, artificial intelligence to start to reach. 

How do you gauge these responses of marine ecosystems in situ and in near real-time, which will be the new horizon in the next 10 years? 

So we're offering increased synergy among these different types of data and also engagement and communication with our increasing realm of agencies, stakeholders bringing in a younger team who is also engaged with the standing team of researchers. So offering a new legacy for partnership and teamwork. So thank you very much. 

[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]