Final technical report - Baseline characterization of environmental conditions leading up to marine protected area establishment in the North Central Coast study region

California’s nearshore marine life is responsive to year-to-year and longer-term changes in ocean conditions. In particular, growth/size, production, and abundance of fish and other taxa are known to change with variation in water temperature, upwelling-favorable winds, and currents. Therefore, baseline information on variability in ocean conditions is required to understand and evaluate changes in populations in this region. This context is critical to monitoring population change and adaptive management of Marine Protected Areas (MPA) in California. Without a simultaneous assessment of the effects of ocean conditions, it will be difficult to formally attribute changes in populations to the protection afforded by MPA designations. In this report, we develop and explore comprehensive indicators of temporal variability in ocean conditions over a 21-year period preceding the establishment of MPAs along California’s north-central coast (NCC). To test the relevance of these indicators to populations, we relate them to a few key biological data sets that are representative of marine life within and outside NCC MPA. This report was originally uploaded to Oceanspaces (http://oceanspaces.org/) in 2013 as part of the North Central Coast baseline monitoring program. In 2020 the baseline data and reports were uploaded to the California Ocean Protection Council Data Repository by Mike Esgro ([e-mail]) and Rani Gaddam ([e-mail]). Every attempt has been made to include all of the original data, metadata, and reports submitted in 2013, but please contact the Data Set Contacts with any questions.