NEPIP - Products

## Anticipated Products

A successful U.S. GLOBEC program in the Northeast Pacific will produce four benefits that would not occur without this program.

- Improved knowledge of the impact of climate variability on marine ecosystems of the eastern North Pacific. Specifically, the program will elucidate mechanisms controlling the abundance and distributions of marine populations, including commercially important fish and benthic species. The improved mechanistic understanding of the coupling between physics and biology will be helpful no matter how future climate evolves. When coupled with improved monitoring systems and biophysical models, the improved mechanistic understanding will improve the reliability of predictions of the future composition of marine communities.

- The development and/or refinement of coupled biophysical models that could be used to examine hypotheses regarding potential impacts of climate variability on marine ecosystems. These models will improve our ability to integrate biological, physical, and climatological observations in coastal ecosystems.

- Data sets will be collected and analyzed during the program that will provide the basis of future research activities in the region. These include historical data sets, data from process-oriented field studies, and data from any longer-term monitoring that we initiate.

- A new basis for resource management. The information generated by this U.S. GLOBEC program will enable those responsible for managing living marine resources to move beyond the traditional fisheries management approach towards a new paradigm that integrates environmental and ecosystem data to better account for variability in production and recruitment. It is now recognized that variability in ocean physical conditions and plankton communities impact the production of living marine resources. It is essential that the environment and ecosystem become a part of fisheries management and that a more holistic, multispecies, ecosystem-oriented approach be used to monitor and regulate the health of our nation's coastal ecosystems, including it's valuable commercially harvested species.