The Pristine Is Gone

Jeremy Bradford Cook Jackson is an American marine ecologist and paleontologist, a professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a senior scientist emeritus at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama. He has published over 150 scientific articles—including eighteen in the prestigious journal ...

Integration and Curation of At-Risk Collections into the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Collections

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at the University of California, San Diego maintains one of the largest combined oceanographic collections in the world comprising four collections: Geological (sediment cores and dredged rocks), Pelagic Invertebrates, Benthic Invertebrates and Marine Vertebrates. After surviving threats of dissolution, the SIO Collections are now securely funded and have been able to make other collections available to the scientific community. Over the last few years, both the Marine Vertebrate (SIO-MVC) and Benthic Invertebrate (SIO-BIC) Collections have received National Science Foundation (NSF) and institutional funding to integrate important at-risk collections from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and the University of Victoria. The UCLA Ichthyological Collection, around 9000 lots, was at risk of disposal due to hazardous material concerns and lack of institutional support. The collection, accumulated primarily under Boyd Walker (1949-1980) and later Don Buth (1980-), contains material from extensive surveys of the near-shore fishes of Southern California, Baja California and the Tropical Eastern Pacific including remote oceanic islands such as the Revillagigedos, Clipperton and the Galapagos. The UCLA collection also contains over 150 secondary types and over 100 species new to the SIO-MVC. Due to lack of support, the collection records were never digitized and the collection was minimally curated and its holdings were poorly known. For over two years, the collection manager and student employees have physically re-curated and integrated this material into the SIO-MVC. These data are now available online via iDigBio and VertNet and have already been used in numerous studies. The SIO-BIC, holding 45,000 lots, is accepting ownership of two deep-sea animal collections from Verena Tunnicliffe at the University of Victoria and Robert Vrijenhoek at MBARI. These collections include 10,900+ lots, largely from hydrothermal vents across the Pacific. Collected over 35 years from remote deep-sea sites that are difficult and expensive to access, these collections represent a major resource for systematics, genetics, and ecology. With Dr. Vrijenhoek now retired and Dr. Tunnicliffe nearing retirement, their collections were at risk of being lost. This material will be made discoverable online through the SIO-BIC database and iDigBio, and will be available for loan and examination. In the last year, the collection manager and five undergraduate employees have integrated some 3,000 lots. With support from the institution and the NSF, the SIO collections are solidifying their roles as central repositories for deep-sea and Eastern Pacific fauna.

How cooperation contributes to scientific advances†

The idea behind the various papers called Food for Thought was to show how advanced researchers developed their careers, informing about successes and misfortunes. This presentation reports not only on the experiences made by the author; it includes those researchers who provided ideas and support for the author which then led to progress. It often occurs that cooperative efforts are actually needed to advance. The interdisciplinary oceanographic studies reported here were made possible by truly cooperative planning and data-sharing efforts of several individuals which then led to our pioneering advances. Similarly, the successes on obtaining the actual feeding behaviour data of calanoid copepods, after decades of guesswork, could only be achieved through cooperation. Much of the credit goes to my colleagues at the Food Chain Research Group at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who pioneered the combination of field and laboratory efforts to arrive at an understanding of biological processes in the ocean. Overall, not so much my initiative-taking but the repeated encouragement by and feed-back from my colleagues and friends both at Scripps, at Skidaway and other institutes made advances possible.

Setting the Stage for a Global Science of Atmospheric Rivers

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography International Atmospheric Rivers Workshop; La Jolla, California, 15–17 June 2015

Inspiring Future Marine and Data Scientists Through the Lure of Ocean Tracks

The Oceans of Data Institute (ODI) at the Education Development Center (EDC), Inc.; Stanford University; and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have been collaborating, with the support of three National Science Foundation grants over the past 5 years, to bring large scientific data sets into secondary and postsecondary classrooms. These efforts have culminated in the development of a Web-based student interface to marine science data called Ocean Tracks (<ext-link ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="http://oceantracks.org">http://oceantracks.org</ext-link>), which incorporates design principles based on a broad range of research findings in fields such as cognitive science, visual design, mathematics education, and learning science. The Ocean Tracks interface was tested in high school classrooms in spring and fall of 2013 with a total of 195 high school students. These tests indicate that students appeared to find many aspects of the interface simple and intuitive to use. Teachers and students indicated that working with real data was highly engaging, pointing to the tremendous potential for “big data” to transform the way science is taught. Interest among college faculty in Ocean Tracks indicates a need in undergraduate classrooms for similar tools that allow students to interact with data. So in the fall of 2014, we began to collect baseline data on students attending undergraduate oceanography classes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps) and Palomar College, where we will also be developing curricula and conducting classroom tests. Preliminary results from this work are presented here.

Sea Surface Temperature Variability at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Pier*

Sea surface temperature (SST) has been measured from near the end of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) pier daily since 1916. It is one of the world’s longest instrumental time series of SST. It is widely used in studies of climate and marine ecosystems and in fisheries management. The authors hypothesized that a discontinuity exists in 1988, when the old pier was replaced with the present pier. A regression of annual-mean SST at SIO (SSTSIO) on the Pacific decadal oscillation index for 1916–87 was used to predict annual-mean SST (SSTSIO, PDO) for 1916–present. The residual (ResSSTSIO = SSTSIO − SSTSIO,PDO) time series shows a positive discontinuity in 1988, when the present SIO pier was first used to measure SSTSIO. No discontinuity in 1988 was observed for ResSST at 12 other shore stations or in nearby waters. Use of the first principal component of other shore station time series of annual-mean SST as the predictor yields similar results. SSTSIO measured over 3 days shows a diel cycle and short-term variability consistent with rip current transport of warm surf-zone water to the end of the SIO pier. This study hypothesizes that rip current transport increased with the change from the old to the present pier and contributed to the observed discontinuity in SIO pier SST. The authors estimate an artifact of about +0.45°C due to both rapid (1988 pier change) and gradual processes. Adjusting the SIO pier SST time series for this artifact reduces the long-term trend from +1.1° to +0.6°C century−1, consistent with the global rate of change of SST over the past century.