A Distributed Observatory for Coastal Adaptation Research, Education, and Engagement

Summary: The U.S. is endowed with an informal network of marine labs with unrealized potential to address the environmental, socio-economic, and cultural impacts of climate change, and, at the same time, grow a diverse and inclusive blue workforce through education and engagement programs. Over the next decade, the scientific and political challenge of climate change is to bring it to the scale of people’s lives – a challenge that can be targeted by small marine labs along the coast. By building a more formal infrastructure that connects this distributed network of field sites, the mosaic of climate change adaptation and resilience can be integrated in a way that reveals cross-scale causality and impacts, and that engages communities and regional economies in the very process of defining research and educational priorities. Each marine lab is embedded in its local community, providing an opportunity to grow a diverse and inclusive blue workforce that includes under-represented communities at the same time as serving needs and interests of local communities across the nation. The US network of marine labs can be transformed into a spatially distributed climate-change observatory that includes both advanced instrumentation and labor-intensive sampling. An innovative partnership of federal agencies with marine labs promises many benefits, including new and historical data sets, distributed engagement, development of local blue workforces, access to education, and actionable information on climate change.

Sector: Academia
Organization: University of California Davis (Bodega Marine Lab)
POC: John Largier, jlargier@ucdavis.edu
Other Contacts: Rick Grosberg, rkgrosberg@ucdavis.edu