BECI Science Plan Development

The Basin Events to Coastal Impacts project, an endorsed project of the UN Decade of Ocean Science and a PICES special project, is convening a group of international experts to collaborate on the development of its next science plan. This invitation-only gathering will help set the course for BECI's next phase of scientific inquiry, connecting state of the art climate and oceanographic models to fisheries management, with special reference to Salmon in the NE Pacific.

Important information for the workshop:

• Workshop and travel information

• BECI Workshop SharePoint Site (open only to participants with granted access)

• Instructions for SharePoint access

If you have any difficulties accessing the SharePoint, please contact Julia at Secretariat@pices.int

Participants

Matthew Baker (Matthew.Baker@nprb.org) is the Science Director at the North Pacific Research Board in Alaska. His research and training is in fisheries ecology and oceanography with interests in salmon, groundfish, forage fish and climate impacts on abundance, distribution, competitive interactions, and ecosystem structure. At NPRB, he is responsible for the development of research partnerships and led the development of its Science Plan, as well as framework and implementation documents for multi-year integrated ecosystem research programs. Previously, he worked for the Resource Assessment and Conservation Engineering and the Resource Ecology and Fisheries Management divisions at the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center. He is affiliate faculty at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the Alaska Pacific University Fisheries Aquatic Science and Technology lab. He also teaches at the Friday Harbor Laboratories in the San Juan Islands where he has maintained a research program for the past 14 years, mentoring students in pelagic ecology.

Jack Barth (jack.barth@oregonstate.edu) is a professor of oceanography in Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. He is also the Executive Director of Oregon State University's Marine Studies Initiative, a program to unite marine-related research, teaching, and outreach and engagement across OSU and the state of Oregon. Jack's research seeks to understand how coastal ocean circulation and water properties shape and influence coastal marine ecosystems. He has led research, technology development and ocean observing system projects off Oregon and around the world. Jack's present research includes a focus on the characteristics and formation of low-oxygen zones off Oregon. His research team uses autonomous underwater gliders, robots beneath the sea surface. Jack is an active participant in PICES with membership on the MONITOR Committee, the Advisory Panel on North Pacific Coastal Ocean Observing Systems, and the Governing Council. 

Sonia Batten's (sonia.batten@pices.int) scientific background is as a biological oceanographer, studying plankton and their role in the ocean ecosystem. Sonia completed her PhD at Southampton University in the UK and then began a post-doc with the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) Survey. After a few years working in the north Atlantic, Sonia moved to western Canada in 2000 to develop the North Pacific CPR survey. More recently, in April 2020, Sonia became the Executive Secretary of the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES). PICES is an intergovernmental science organisation which promotes collaborative marine research in the northern North Pacific and adjacent seas across the 6 member countries that border the region (Canada, Japan, People's Republic of China, Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America). Sonia manages the Secretariat, based in British Columbia, Canada and the activities and budget of the organization. Priorities for PICES are to promote the collection and rapid exchange of scientific information on the ocean environment, climate change, living resources and their ecosystems, and the impacts of human activities in the North Pacific. PICES sponsors and organizes international conferences and capacity development events, as well as its own Annual meeting, to facilitate, promote and disseminate scientific knowledge on these issues.

Steven Bograd (steven.bograd@noaa.gov) is a research oceanographer at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, where he leads the Climate-Ecosystems Group. He holds BS degrees in physics and atmospheric sciences from the University of Arizona, a MS in atmospheric sciences from the University of Washington, and a PhD in physical oceanography from the University of British Columbia. He uses large-scale atmospheric and oceanographic datasets to explore variability in the physical and biogeochemical properties of the coastal ocean. In recent years, his research focus has been on characterizing long-term changes in source water properties in the California Current System; on climate-induced changes in the intensity and timing of coastal upwelling; and on the ecosystem impacts of these changes. Steven is the Co-Chair of the PICES Advisory Panel on the UN Decade of Ocean Science (AP-UNDOS), and Co-Chair of two UNDOS-endorsed Programmes: the joint ICES-PICES Sustainability of MArine Ecosystems Through global knowledge NETworks Programme (SmartNet); and the NOAA-sponsored Sustainability, Predictability and Resilience of Marine Ecosystems Programme (SUPREME).  

Robin Brown (Robin.Brown.PICES@outlook.com) is the retired Executive Secretary of PICES. Prior to this, he was Manager of the Ocean Science Division at DFO’s Institute of Ocean Sciences, where he was responsible for a research group of 70 people conducting oceanographic research in the NE Pacific and Arctic Oceans. He is now serving as an advisor to PICES, assisting with the development of the BECI Project.

Brendan Connors (Brendan.Connors@dfo-mpo.gc.ca) is a research scientist at DFO, based out of the Institute of Ocean Sciences on southern Vancouver Island. His background is in salmon population ecology and his research Program at DFO is focused on quantitative methods to understand salmon responses to a changing ocean, biocomplexity in large river basins, and fishery risk assessment. Brendan is particularly interested in opportunities for BECI to (1) advance understanding of how marine fishes are, and will, respond to climate change and (2) help adapt transboundary fisheries management systems to a warming ocean.  

Maycira Costa (maycira@uvic.ca) is the director of the Spectral Remote Sensing Research Laboratory in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria. Costa has a BSc in Biological Oceanography and an MSc and Ph.D. in Remote Sensing. Maycira Costa’s research focuses on monitoring dynamic processes in the open and coastal oceans and nearshore habitats of British Columbia by effectively using remotely sensed data. As part of her research, Costa is broadly renowned for technological innovations that allow her to conduct holistic analyses of satellite products to address societally relevant questions at large spatial and temporal scales. Her work has relied heavily on strong collaboration with academia, government, not-for-profits, industry, and coastal communities, including First Nations. Costa serves as an adviser in satellite missions with the Japanese Exploratory Space Agency, the European Space Agency Ocean Colour initiatives, and the Canadian Space Agency satellite missions.

Richard Dewey (rdewey@uvic.ca) is a Physical Oceanographer (PhD UBC '87) and has worked extensively throughout the Pacific and Canadian Arctic regions. He has particular interests in coastal and boundary layer dynamics, and the specific influence of tides, currents, and turbulence, as well as larger scale processes such as Upwelling, El Nino, and Marine Heat Waves. Richard specializes in observational techniques, and for the last twenty years has helped build one of the world's most comprehensive ocean observing systems as the Associate Director for Science with Ocean Networks Canada. 

Cameron Freshwater (Cameron.Freshwater@dfo-mpo.gc.ca) is a research scientist in DFO’s Ecosystem Science Division at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo. His research focuses on the interaction between salmon ecology and fisheries management. Generally, he uses data from marine tagging studies or surveys to better understand the spatio-temporal distribution of salmon stocks and identify environmental drivers that might limit population productivity. Much of his current work is focused on understanding interactions between Chinook salmon and resident killer whales. He is particularly interested in using BECI to expand the understanding of how marine communities in the Pacific Ocean interact with one another and how these interactions are likely to change in the context of climate change.  

Amber M. Holdsworth (Amber.Holdsworth@dfo-mpo.gc.ca) is a multi-disciplinary scientist with publications in the areas of epidemiology, fluid dynamics, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, regional climate modelling and climate impacts on marine organisms. Dr. Holdsworth has been developing and analyzing regional biogeochemical ocean models for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) since 2017. Her current research interests include understanding extreme conditions of acidification, deoxygenation and heat in the recent past as well as projecting the impacts of climate change on marine organisms and ecosystems.   

Brian Hunt (b.hunt@oceans.ubc.ca) is an Associate Professor at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia. He is an ecosystem oceanographer whose research focuses on the structure and function of pelagic marine ecosystems, and their connectivity to adjacent ocean, land and climatic systems. Much of his research is conducted through the lens of marine food webs, unravelling the physical / chemical processes that drive production, the complex connections between lower trophic levels, emergent properties of food web nutrition, and implications for higher trophic levels. Through developing an understanding of how food webs work his work aims to advance a mechanistic understanding of ecosystem response to climate change and other anthropogenic impacts, and a framework for ocean solutions. Brian is interested in BECI’s ambition to connect coastal, shelf, and open ocean systems, and the research community that works across these domains, in the framework of societal needs.

Brett Johnson (brett.johnson@hakai.org) is a Scientific Data Specialist at the Hakai Institute based in coastal British Columbia, Canada and is a Registered Professional Biologist with the BC College of Applied Biology. His work has focussed on studying salmon in freshwater and marine ecosystems since 2010, with particular attention to early life history stages. At the Hakai Institute he provides leadership for the Juvenile Salmon Program while also working in the IT department developing data infrastructure and processes for mobilizing scientific data from a wide array of Hakai programs. He serves as the technical lead for the International Year of the Salmon data mobilization efforts for Hakai, is a member of the PICES Technical Committee on Data Exchange (TCODE), and has worked on a number of Task Teams for the Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System (CIOOS).

Matt Jones (jones@nceas.ucsb.edu) directs the Informatics program at NCEAS, which focuses on both supporting efficient synthesis through scientific computing and on building new advanced infrastructure to support data sharing, preservation, analysis, and modeling. Matt is the Director of the DataONE program, a global network of interoperable data repositories, and of the NSF Arctic Data Center. In addition to data infrastructure work at NCEAS, Matt also helps to build the NCEAS Learning Hub through an emphasis on data science and reproducible research teaching.Matt’s career has focused on improving data science infrastructure to support cross-disciplinary and synthetic science, principally through the development of open source software for data repositories, metadata systems, and reproducible analysis and modeling.Matt has a M.S. in Zoology from the University of Florida that focused on the ecology of plant-animal interactions, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.

Prof. Dr. Sung Yong Kim (syongkim@kaist.ac.kr) is a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea. He received a B.S. in Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 1999 and a Ph.D. in Applied Ocean Science from Scripps Institution of Oceanography/University of California -- San Diego, La Jolla, USA, in 2009. His research interests include coastal circulation, sub-mesoscale processes, statistical and dynamical data analysis, environmental parameterization, and operational coastal ocean observing systems. He has served as a chair of the Technical Committee (MONITOR), a co-chair of the Advisory Panel of the North Pacific Coastal Ocean Observing System (AP-NPCOOS), and a member of the Working Group of Climate Extremes and Coastal Impacts in the Pacific (WG-49) and Sub-mesoscale Processes and Marine Ecosystems (WG-50) in the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES), as a member of Boundary Currents and Shelf Sea Interactions (BC/SSI) Task Team under Ocean Observations Physics and Climate (OOPC) Panel, Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and the Pool of Experts for United Nations Regular Process -- World Ocean Assessment (1st, 2nd, and 3rd periods).  

Nate Mantua (nate.mantua@noaa.gov) leads NOAA’s Landscape and Seascape Ecology Team at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, CA. He is a climate scientist with research focused on climate dynamics, climate impacts on natural resources, and the use of climate information in resource management. Much of his work has focused on climate, marine life, and fisheries in the North Pacific Ocean and western North America, including understanding climate impacts on Pacific salmon ecology and salmon fisheries.  

Liping yin (yinlp@fio.org.cn) is a physical oceanographer at the First Institute of Oceanography, MNR, China. She received the MS degree in Numerical Mathematics, and PhD in Physical Oceanography from Ocean University of China. She studied the mechanism of coastal trapped waves especially in the East China Sea. After that, she developed a transport model based on the OSF to study the impact of ocean physics on the zooplankton movement, oil spill, and biological processes. She has been a staff scientist in the International CLIVAR Project Office for 5 years.

Rebecca Martone (rebecca.martone@tula.org) is the Executive Director for the Ocean Decade Collaborative Center for the Northeast Pacific Region, hosted by the Tula Foundation. Over the past 20-years Rebecca has worked as an applied marine ecologist addressing a variety of issues in coastal ecosystems across the west coast of North America, including marine spatial planning, small-scale fisheries sustainability, cumulative impacts to coastal ecosystems, and monitoring estuarine, intertidal, and kelp forest ecosystems. As the former Assistant Science Director at the Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford University in California, she has experience linking science with decision making and co-developing science for solutions. Until recently, she worked with the Province of British Columbia to help implement the Marine Plan Partnership and develop a network of MPAs in the Great Bear Sea in collaboration with 17 coastal First Nations. In her current role, Rebecca and her team work to support and facilitate collaborative, co-designed, co-produced transboundary knowledge for solutions to the major challenges facing the oceans and people in the Northeast Pacific, with the aim of improving their health and resilience.

Barbara Muhling (barbara.muhling@noaa.gov) is a researcher at the University of California – Santa Cruz, based at the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, California. Her current research focuses on the distribution and ecology of pelagic fishes in the California Current System, and the broader North Pacific. She is particularly interested in how these species may respond to environmental variability and climate change, as well as the potential impacts of shifting species distributions on fisheries and fishing communities. She is a member of the CLIOTOP Scientific Steering Committee, and has co-chaired working groups on climate change and species distributions through PICES and NOAA.

Vladimir Radchenko (vlrad@npafc.org) was born in Ukraine (USSR Republic) and educated at the Kharkov State University at the faculty of Biology. He started his career as a chief researcher at Pacific Research Fleet Base, Vladivostok, Russia, and then worked up through several scientific and managerial positions in fisheries research institutes in Vladivostok and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russian Federation. His research interests include North Pacific marine ecosystems, Pacific salmon, conservation biology, and fisheries management. In 2010, he became the Deputy Head at the Science & Education Department in the Federal Agency on Fisheries in Moscow. He moved to Vancouver in June 2013 to become NPAFC Executive Director. Strong IYS supporter since initial stages of development, one of organizers and participants of the Gulf of Alaska cruise in 2019.

Tetjana Ross (tetjana.ross@dfo-mpo.gc.ca) is a Research Scientist at Fisheries and Oceans Canada. She is an observational oceanographer, focusing on assessing change in the Northeast Pacific. She mostly observes the ocean by sending robots out to do the work. These robots, autonomous ocean floats and gliders, send back observations of ocean temperature, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll and acoustic scattering, which she uses to monitor marine heatwaves, study eddies carrying coastal waters far into the deep ocean and assess long term acidification and oxygen loss in the Northeast Pacific.

Alberto Rovellini (arovel@uw.edu) is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Washington and the NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, WA, USA. He is a quantitative ecologist and is currently work on developing and applying an Atlantis ecosystem model for the Gulf of Alaska (GOA), with the goal of exploring past and future changes in ecosystem productivity driven by thermal events and global climate change. He is interested in BECI’s aim to link basin-scale biological and oceanographic processes to the GOA shelf system that my current research focuses on. He is also interested in BECI’s effort to involve agencies and collaborators from different countries, which was challenging in his current project. He believes his expertise as an ecosystem modeler in the GOA and his perspective on data needs for ecosystem modeling research can be valuable to the BECI team.  

Ryan Rykaczewski (ryan.rykaczewski@noaa.gov) is a fisheries oceanographer with NOAA's Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center in Honolulu, USA. His research focuses on the sensitivity of marine biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem structure, and fisheries production to changes in ocean climate and physics. Ryan has particular interest in improving understanding of variability in the central and eastern North Pacific and its pelagic ecology. Ultimately, he hopes that a better grasp of oceanographic processes can improve the management of living marine resources.

Mark Saunders (msaunders@yearofthesalmon.org) currently works for the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission in Vancouver, British Columbia where he is the Director for the north Pacific Region of the International Year of the Salmon initiative. He retired several years ago from the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans where he headed up a Salmon, Aquaculture and Freshwater Ecology Division at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, BC with staff working on salmon stock assessment, freshwater habitat, molecular genetics, fish health, and marine ecology. The early part of Mark’s career focused on stock assessment of marine fish as well as research related to hydroacoustic surveys and fisheries oceanography of the California current system. Mark and his wife Gail live in the small town of Chemainus on Vancouver Island. He has two grown daughters in their 20’s. In his spare time, Mark enjoys sailing, kayaking, skiing, sport fishing and being walked by his 100lb Bernadoodle dog named Willlow.

Aidan Schubert (aschubert@npafc.org) is the International Year of the Salmon (IYS) High Seas Expedition Coordinator for the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC) and has been with NPAFC since 2021. His role involves coordinating the post-expedition research taking place throughout the North Pacific with partners from Russia, Japan, Korea, USA and Canada, and assisting with efforts to mobilize data coming from this research. Aidan was part of the science team on the F/V Raw Spirit as part of the IYS 2022 Expedition. Other projects that Aidan is involved includes the NPAFC Working Group on Stock Assessment in writing the Status of Pacific Salmon and Steelhead Trout Report, the Northern Hemisphere Pink Salmon Experts Group and the International Indigenous Salmon Peoples Group. Aidan has a Bachelor of Science and Masters of Biological Science, specializing in marine biology, from the University of Western Australia, also completing an exchange semester at the University of Ottawa. Aidan’s experience in Australia and Canada has ranged from environmental and marine science consulting roles, data archaeology work on freshwater fisheries in Kenya, and marine science education at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre. Aidan’s interests include international scientific collaboration, science communication, small scale fisheries and links to local food security.

Charles Seaton (cseaton@critfc.org) is an ocean and estuary modeler with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), a fisheries technical services and management policy coordination organization created by the Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce tribes of the Columbia River basin. Charles led the transition of the Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction Program (CMOP) from OHSU to CRITFC in 2020 and coordinates the CMOP program at CRITFC. Charles uses unstructured grid models (SCHISM) for modeling the watershed-to-ocean system, primarily focused on the Columbia River. For the past two years, Charles has applied SCHISM to modeling the Pacific basin from the Bering Strait to 30 S.  

Neil Swart (Neil.Swart@ec.gc.ca) is a climate scientist specializing in Earth System Models (ESMs) at environment Canada's Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. He coordinates the team that builds the Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM), which is widely deployed for climate modelling applications including contributing to Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and other major internationally coordinated projects. With their collaborators, they are working towards developing the Canadian Three Ocean Downscaling System (CanTODS), for conducting high resolution downscaling of both climate projections and seasonal to decadal climate predictions, including ocean biogeochemistry. Since CanTODS will span the north east Pacific and Arctic, they are optimistic that it could provide useful information on ocean physical and biogeochemical changes to BECI. More generally, he enjoys research on climate variability and change, and he has worked on various interactions between the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and the carbon cycle.