Cover
& Introduction

Sanctuary Program
Accomplishments

Looking Back Over
Ten Years

Beach Systems

Rocky Intertidal
& Subtidal Systems

Open Ocean
& Deep Water
Systems

The Physical
Environment

Wetlands
& Watersheds

Endangered
& Threatened
Species

Marine Mammals

Harvested
Species

Exotic Species

Sacntuary
Activities

Human
Interactions

Site Profile:
Pigeon Point

Credits

Dedicated in 1992, the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is the largest of thirteen sanctuaries nationwide managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Encompassing more than 5,300 square miles of water, its boundaries stretch along the central California coast from the Marin County headlands south to Cambria. The Sanctuary features many diverse biological communities, including wave-swept beaches, lush kelp forests, and one of the deepest underwater canyons in North America. An abundance of life, from tiny plankton to huge blue whales, thrives in these waters.

Our mission—to understand and protect the coastal ecosystem and cultural resources of central California—is carried out through the work of four program divisions: resource protection, education and outreach, research, and program support. A summary of each program’s major accomplishments and activities for 2001 follows.

Volunteer Bonnie Van Hise and Sanctuary staff member Karen Grimmer collect water samples for the “First Flush” event in October. photo Irene Morris for MBNMS

The goal of the Resource Protection Program is to initiate and implement strategies to reduce or prevent detrimental human impacts on the Sanctuary. We address this goal through permits and enforcement, emergency response, and collaborations with other organizations and stakeholder groups.

Several efforts were initiated this year to develop regional guidelines on resource protection issues. By collaborating with the California Coastal Commission, we began work on evaluating and developing a comprehensive approach to both desalination projects and coastal armoring projects such as seawalls and revetments. Similarly, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) we began developing a regional approach to fireworks displays that allows for the continuation of these festivities but limits their expansion, to ensure that significant noise impacts on marine mammals are avoided.

We worked with the Alliance of Communities for Sustainable Fisheries, a coalition of the region’s fishing organizations, and other partners to evaluate the potential advantages and drawbacks of marine reserves that could limit fishing at some sites on the central coast. We continued our participation with the California Department of Transportation to develop a Coast Highway Management Plan for the Big Sur region that will maintain highway access while minimizing impacts of highway landslide disposal activities on marine life.

The resource protection team also reviewed sixty permit requests this year, issuing permits or authorizations for activities such as seabed alterations, discharges to the Sanctuary, and overflights below 1,000 feet in restricted zones. Various conditions were imposed on these activities to reduce or eliminate threats to Sanctuary resources. We also reviewed and commented on a variety of other projects, including ensuring that noise pollution in the Sanctuary would be minimized from proposed military operations such as a bombing range at Fort Hunter Liggett and a towed low-frequency array that would introduce additional noise sources offshore.

The first year of our pilot enforcement program was completed with the assistance of a dedicated special agent from NOAA’s Office of Law Enforcement. California Department of Fish and Game (CDFG) and California State Parks rangers who are cross-deputized to enforce Sanctuary regulations also contributed more than 2,500 patrol hours. Enforcement cases leading to NOAA investigations during the year were primarily instances involving harassment of marine mammals or seabirds, unauthorized discharges into the Sanctuary, and seabed alteration.

We handled twelve emergency response events this year, ranging from tarballs on local beaches to sewage spills and small vessel groundings. We coordinated the salvage and de-fueling of three small vessel groundings, assessed damage to marine resources in collaboration with our research team, and initiated multi-agency discussions on ways to prevent and respond to these events better.

The Water Quality Protection Program and its partners continued to carry out plans for reducing contaminated runoff to Sanctuary waters. Funding obtained by Congressman Sam Farr to assist our partners in implementing the Sanctuary’s agricultural plan has allowed the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the University of California Cooperative Extension, and the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Foundation to recruit a variety of new staff. The region’s farm bureaus have established five pilot projects with their members in various Sanctuary watersheds to control sediment and nitrate runoff, and we worked with them to establish tracking and monitoring protocols to map the success of these efforts.

The Sanctuary Citizen Watershed Monitoring Network continued to coordinate twenty volunteer water quality monitoring groups. It organized several training sessions and led two region-wide monitoring events. Snapshot Day in April turned out 148 volunteers throughout the Sanctuary watersheds to assess coliform, nitrate, and sediment levels in more than 110 creeks, while “First Flush” sampling involved thirty-nine volunteers testing for these contaminants during the first heavy rain of the season, in October. The data were provided to local resource managers to help identify and reduce levels of contamination and to the public to enhance education.

We also began to focus additional effort on coliform bacterial levels and local beach closures, cosponsoring two public forums on the topic in January and beginning work with local cities to identify resources for replacing aging sewage pipelines.

The goal of the Education and Outreach Program is to promote understanding and stewardship of the Sanctuary. Our main focus in 2001 was to continue expansion of education and outreach efforts Sanctuary-wide by collaborating with an array of partners.

Long-time sponsor the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments (AMBAG), along with NMFS and other partners, helped us organize the March Sanctuary Currents Symposium. The two-day event, entitled Fishing for Our Future, provided a venue for researchers to share their findings and for commercial and sport fishers to share their perspectives on local fisheries. Individuals and organizations were honored for their dedication to the Sanctuary.

Collaborations in Santa Cruz reached new highs, as the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Interagency Task Force, comprised of local, state, and federal government representatives, dedicated the first interpretive panel of its largest project—the Sanctuary Scenic Trail—at the Santa Cruz Harbor. We were delighted to support this community effort with new funding to produce many more of the interpretive elements outlined by the task force’s plan.

The efforts in Santa Cruz County have inspired a new local committee to extend the scenic trail along the entire Monterey Bay crescent. AMBAG is working closely with agency representatives to map existing and proposed trail locations. An interpretive committee is working to integrate the Santa Cruz design with Monterey’s messages. Sanctuary education staff are members of both Santa Cruz and Monterey efforts.

Our partnership with California State Parks now includes all districts contiguous with the Sanctuary’s boundaries. Housed with the San Simeon District headquarters, our educator in the south has been participating in campfire presentations, beach walks, and Coastal Cleanup efforts. Monterey District’s regional interpretive specialist, Pat Clark-Gray, chairs the Sanctuary’s Education Panel and holds the education seat on the Sanctuary Advisory Council (SAC). Santa Cruz District superintendent Dave Vincent is working with local officials to incorporate the idea of a Sanctuary Visitor Center into current county planning. In addition, our Santa Cruz educator worked with park interpretive staff to develop a new field trip program for grades K-2 at Seacliff State Beach. Finally, our new Half Moon Bay office will afford opportunities to work with the Bay Area District.

The Sanctuary Education Panel (SEP), comprised of members from local marine science education institutions and schools, began working to help create the Sanctuary’s Regional Education Plan for the next ten years. The plan’s completion awaits public input from scoping sessions held during the Sanctuary’s Management Plan Review.

Sanctuary Education Coordinator Dawn Hayes leads students on a field trip to the Pacific Grove tidepools. photo Karen Grimmer for MBNMS

Our annual Student Summit, designed to inspire high school student teams to undertake field projects, again featured the theme of ecosystem monitoring. This year Monterey Peninsula College joined the program to offer the Summit and its related activities as a course with college credit. In April sixty students from ten high schools formally presented their project results to an audience of peers and local scientists. A new plan for reaching multicultural audiences called Multicultural Education for Resource Issues Threatening Oceans (M.E.R.I.T.O.) is complete. Funding sources are being identified for three main program elements: community-based programs to work with youth and family-serving institutions; site-based programs hosted at state parks and Elkhorn Slough; and teacher programs to work with minority-serving institutions of higher learning to assist teachers in training and students in the sciences.

On a smaller scale, several other projects were accomplished. Education staff worked with Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve staff to host the NOAA workshop Training Needs Assessment. New brochures for the general public and for divers were produced, while our 50 Ways to Get Your Feet Wet in Santa Cruz County and Summary of Regulations brochures were reprinted. Team OCEAN kayak staff and volunteers made 3,850 contacts with people on the water and land to provide information and prevent possible marine mammal and bird disturbances. Finally, the “Dirty Words” radio campaign, focusing on water quality, won gold Addy Awards for Best Public Service Announcements in both English and Spanish.

The Research Program focuses on science for resource management, identifying information gaps, developing collaborative studies to improve understanding of issues, and interpreting research for decision makers. The Sanctuary Research Program works closely with the many top-notch research institutions around central California, largely through our Research Activity Panel (RAP). Dr. Gregor Cailliet, who has led this group since the Sanctuary’s inception, this year turned over his successful tenure as chair to Dr. Chris Harrold. A history of the RAP is now available on the Sanctuary web site.

We know that the natural and cultural resources of the Sanctuary are nationally significant, but it is an ongoing effort to determine where all the habitats are located and what lives in them. Completing a five-year, multi-institutional effort (that we supported through funding and ship and staff time) the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) produced fine maps that detail the geology of much of the Sanctuary seafloor. A related project will provide us with information on the distribution and abundance of invertebrates that were collected in the USGS sediment samples. This information gives managers great insight into, for example, where it is safe to lay cables or why organisms congregate where they do.

Higher on the food chain, we discovered with NMFS and Hubbs Sea World Research Institute that one of the Sanctuary’s endangered species, the leatherback turtle, migrates here after laying eggs in Indonesia. The oceanographic conditions in the Sanctuary provide excellent habitat for jellyfish, upon which the turtles feed. We continue to observe the links between our unique Sanctuary environment and a biodiversity that supports growing ecotourism and significant fisheries, conducting field measurements of physical conditions and animal counts while developing new predictive oceanographic models. Finally, expanding our breadth of resource inventories, we completed a list of known shipwrecks, including an oil tanker sunk by the Japanese during World War II, a 785-foot dirigible—the Macon, and transportation ships dating from the Gold Rush era.

Our research team has initiated new studies on the impacts of boat groundings, like this vessel that sank off Big Sur last fall, to the rocky intertidal. photo Scott Kathey for MBNMS

To assess the health of the Sanctuary, it is necessary to know how its natural resources are changing through time. This year, we expanded our beached marine mammal and bird surveys to the Cambria region and continued monitoring birds and mammals in Monterey Bay. These data have been used to investigate impacts of harmful algal blooms and seabird by-catch in fishing gillnets. This year a higher number of young, dead California Brown Pelicans seems to be a positive sign that the population is growing rather than suggesting a new threat to this endangered species. A monumental success this year was starting to implement the Sanctuary Integrated Monitoring Program (SIMoN), including an award of $2 million from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to initiate critical new monitoring. We will now be able to understand ecosystem changes and their causes much more comprehensively for many years to come.

Our research staff are continually interacting with other agencies, educational institutions, researchers, and the public through meetings, developing documents, and responding to requests for information. This year the CDFG accepted essentially all the kelp management recommendations that the Sanctuary staff developed with scientists, the SAC, and the public over the last year. We’ve also provided scientific information to assist deliberations by community groups like the Alliance of Communities for Sustainable Fisheries and have updated a report on the status of fisheries in the Sanctuary. We plan to continue influencing conservation science with recent work by one of our team members on how removing oxygen from ballast water in ships can prevent species introductions (like a new kelp from Japan found in Monterey Harbor this year, see page 21) while reducing ship corrosion. There is also already great interest in our newly initiated studies on the human impacts of groundings and visitors to rocky shores.

The Program Support team continued to provide necessary administrative and operational support to allow us to stay focused on our mission and goals. Expanding our horizons beyond Monterey and Santa Cruz, we opened a new satellite office in San Simeon, which is co-located with the California Department of Parks and Recreation at Hearst Castle, and helped establish a national program office in Half Moon Bay. We also continued to operate the patrol vessel Sharkcat to monitor permitted activities and support research and education efforts.

Staff began to implement the joint management plan review process (along with Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones Sanctuaries) in 2001 with an initial internal assessment and preparation of the State of the Sanctuary Report. The report provided background information on the Sanctuary’s resources, history, accomplishments, and potential future resource issues and served as a base from which the public could offer comments and suggestions during the scoping process for the Sanctuary’s management plan review. The scoping process, which occurred this winter in locations throughout central California as well as in Sacramento and Washington D.C., will help the Sanctuary define those priority issues to be addressed in the management plan update. The management plan review process will continue through 2002.

The Sanctuary Advisory Council continued to work with staff to establish priorities for the Sanctuary, provide a forum for presenting public issues and concerns, and provide information and advice to the superintendent. Many new members joined the Council this year, filling the primary and alternate seats for agriculture, at-large (3), business/ industry, fishing, recreation, research, and tourism. Issues of interest and concern in 2001 included the management plan review process, California’s Marine Life Protection Act, fiberoptic cable policy, SAC charter amendment, and the Sanctuary’s new multicultural education plan.

As in the past, the Council worked closely with the Conservation Working Group, RAP, SEP, and Business and Tourism Activity Panel (BTAP) to obtain information on these issues. The BTAP was formally established as a working group of the Advisory Council and will continue to be a key tool for developing partnerships with the region’s marine-related businesses.

The Monterey Bay Sanctuary Foundation was busy marketing and distributing numerous educational products and managing grants in support of the Sanctuary mission. Projects included Point Pinos tidepool issue facilitation, salmon/steelhead education projects, and Citizen Watershed Monitoring Network coordination. In an exciting development, the Foundation will be helping the Sanctuary with SIMoN coordination efforts and will manage a sizeable SIMoN grant from Duke Energy and the Packard Foundation.

Finally, our web site received a major overhaul and can be viewed at www.mbnms.nos.noaa.gov.