Oregon Sea Grant

Numerous populations of salmon and trout undergo extensive migrations, migrating from freshwater to the sea and throughout ocean basins. Years later they return to their natal streams with remarkable accuracy and precision. The outward migration is accomplished without the benefit of following experienced migrants or prior individual experience. Evidence suggests that Pacific salmon and trout use the earth’s geomagnetic fields when undertaking these migrations.

The appropriate use of disaggregated economic data not only improves the accuracy and robustness of economic analyses, but also extends the existing economic models to address new aspects of the issue. This dissertation consists of three essays: two essays use disaggregated economic-engineering data to address spatial heterogeneity in economic losses and regional interdependencies for Tsunami impact assessment and resilience planning in State of Oregon.

Commercial fishing research often focuses on ecological (gear, stock assessment, traceability) or economic factors. Truly understanding the social-ecological system requires considering the entire “human dimension” and this includes the social, cultural, and legal/policy aspects as well. An understudied yet important factor is women’s contribution to fishing at the family and community level.

In the past two decades, occurrences of summertime upwelling-driven low dissolved oxygen (DO) events, or hypoxia, have increased along the northeast Pacific coast. If hypoxic events are severe enough to cause marine species mortality, the areas affected are often called “dead zones.” In 2002 and again in 2006, the events were lethal, resulting in mass invertebrate and fish kills. Many organisms are impacted by these events, but less mobile juvenile fishes and crabs are potentially more vulnerable to the long-term effects of these stressful conditions than adults.

Wind-driven coastal upwelling brings subsurface water onto the central-Oregon shelf after the spring transition each year. This cold and salty source water is oxygen-poor, yet above the hypoxic threshold, dissolved oxygen < 1.4 ml l-1. Once on the shelf, dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations of upwelled near-bottom waters are modified by physical and biological shelf processes, such as advection, mixing and microbial respiration.

Microbial natural products represent a massive repository of unique chemical scaffolds with corresponding diverse biological functions. However, in the past decade the development of natural products into new therapeutics has dwindled, in part due to the challenges posed by high rediscovery rates and low throughput associated with classical bioassay-guided fractionation methods. Recent research shows that most microbes express only a fraction of their total biosynthetic potential under standard monophyletic culture conditions.

Estuaries represent the confluence of land and ocean environments and encompass a number of complex interactions amongst tides, winds, offshore waves and the riverine contributions, all of which contribute to total water levels (TWLs).The study of TWLs and the relative weight of its components can assist local comm

Influences of tidal and slower (subtidal) oceanic flows over the continental shelf and slope off Oregon are studied using a high-resolution ocean circulation model and comparative model-data analyses. The model is based on the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS), a fully nonlinear, three-dimensional model (using hydrostatic and Boussinesq approximations).

The recent rise of inner shelf hypoxia in the California Current System has caused concern within the scientific community, sparking a surge in studies addressing the issue. While regional studies of hypoxia abound, relatively little attention has been focused on the smaller coastal estuarine systems in the Pacific Northwest. Here, we present results fromCoos Bay, a small, highly seasonal estuary on the southern Oregon coast.