Research
 CMOP's research explores new ways to study and understand the coastal areas to address the increasing challenges faced by those environments due to human activities and changing climate. CMOP organizes its research into three science and technology themes; Coastal Margin Collaboratories, Coastal Margin Science, and Enabling Technologies. |
CMOP explores paradigms for coastal margin science that transcend both geography and traditional space/time scales. Enabling these paradigms are collaboratories: structured integrations of information, methods and people, anchored on modern observation and modeling systems. The driver for CMOP is a Grand Challenge: society’s increasingly urgent need to anticipate and address the responses of coastal margins to climate and anthropogenic changes, timely enough to positively affect outcomes on environmental sustainability, economic development and public health.
CMOP and its collaboratory concept provide an opportunity for transformative science: this results from integrated, high-resolution and long-term observations and simulations, available timely and broadly across a steadily increasing range of variables, phenomena and scales. The desired outcome is a mechanistic gene-to-climate understanding of the contemporary state, and variability, of the coastal margin, sufficient to enable timely detection and prediction of local response to large-scale changes and anthropogenic activities.
The Columbia River coastal margin and CMOP's SATURN collaboratory are used to illustrate vision, methods, progress and challenges.
Science rationale and process
Coastal margins are regions where complex physical circulation dictates large-scale biological phenomena (e.g., algal blooms; development and persistence of acidified or low-oxygen zones) by mechanisms that can vary along the river-to-ocean continuum. A greater understanding of river-to-ocean coupling is required if we are to better predict – and potentially mitigate – the impacts of climate change and human activities on coastal margin productivity and ecological functions. CMOP’s research team brings together scientists from an unusually wide variety of disciplines (many of which seldom if ever work together elsewhere) to create long-term and high-resolution observations and simulations of a broad range of physical, chemical and biological quantities, to allow us to understand processes at both large and small scales.
What are E-GRs?
We focus our studies on the creation and persistence of ecological hotspots that result from the coupling and decoupling of physical, chemical and biological processes at times and regions of steep gradients (Events and Gradient Regions, abbreviated “E-GRs”). We focus here because E-GRs appear particularly susceptible to changes in climate and in human land/water uses. E-GRs often reflect physical mechanisms/phenomena by which biogeochemical variability is generated or accentuated.
Through a planned, bottom-up intellectual process our focus has converged on a small number of high-level scientific questions, all of which are central to sustainability and management of the Columbia River coastal margin under changing climate and land/water uses:
- Question 1: What are the roles of microbial assemblages relative to ecological function and energy transfers in the Columbia River coastal margin? What factors (physical, chemical, biological) control the roles and spatial and temporal patterns of those assemblages?
- Question 2: How effective is the Columbia River estuary-plume system as a bioreactor for transformation and removal of river-borne nutrients and biogenic inputs?
- Question 3: How are evolving conditions of ocean-derived acidification and hypoxia in the PNW continental shelf influencing ecological function and energy transfers in the Columbia River estuary and plume?
- Question 4: Do circulation and biogeochemical processes and/or microbial community structure reflect ecological function so as to provide sentinels of large ecosystem shifts in response to climate change or to regulation of river flow?
Together, the above central questions organize and coordinate our science as we address the Grand Challenge. Every major issue pertaining to the Columbia River coastal margin (e.g., salmon recovery, impacts of climate change, ocean acidification and hypoxia, harmful algal blooms, hydropower management, navigation improvements, emerging contaminants, etc.) will substantially benefit from answers to these central questions. Answers are needed to enable the region to plan for sustainable development under changing external drivers, and to make objective science a more effective tool for conflict mediation (or even prevention). The process of getting to the answers offers great opportunity to educate the next (“collaboratory-savvy”) generation of scientists both directly and via innovative partnerships, and to engage American Indians and other underrepresented segments of the US population.
The central questions are, indeed, challenging: each could be overwhelming if not addressed through a long-term, iterative scientific framework (provided here by CMOP), and if not supported by an eclectic and fast-evolving inventory of observations and observation-informed si-mulations (provided here by SATURN and CMOP’s oceanographic campaigns). Within this context, we engage in both “discovery-driven” science (which is exploratory and observational), and “hypothesis-driven” science (in which carefully-formulated specific questions – usually suggested by exploratory work – are addressed in detail by ad-hoc teams taking advantage of CMOP’s collaboration-enabling infrastructure. We consider BOTH ‘exploratory’ and ‘hypothesis-driven’ science essential to understanding E-GRs and their individual and cumulative ecological roles, at the level and with the broad scope required to addressing our central questions.
Three “framing hypotheses” link E-GRs to the Grand Challenge. These framing hypotheses are propounded at a higher level than traditional “null hypotheses” within ‘hypothesis-driven’ science; they are not designed to be specifically proved or negated, but rather to serve as high-level vision statements for how the system works:
- Framing Hypothesis 1: E-GRs play a central role in the ecological function and productivity of coastal margins, with microbial communities as essential mediators.
- Framing Hypothesis 2: The timing, duration and spatial extent of E-GRs are highly responsive to forcing from land, water, ocean and atmosphere.
- Framing Hypothesis 3: E-GRs and their associated microorganisms may provide effective “sentinels” to detect and/or anticipate the response of coastal margins to changes in climate and land/water use.
The framing hypotheses provide long-term center-wide scientific direction. Within these framing hypotheses, a number of more specific sub-hypotheses emerge, each testable and often with a short-to-intermediate lifespan. Each sub-hypothesis mobilizes teams of CMOP scientists and of SATURN and campaign assets, and each helps to address (partially) one or more central question(s).
Thematic organization of the CMOP research
To address the Grand Challenge, CMOP organizes its research into three broad science and technology themes (each with targeted multi-project programs):
THEME I: COASTAL MARGIN COLLABORATORIES, wherein we explore and advance (a) what constitutes, (b) how to build, sustain and evolve, and (c) how to create the conditions for the effective use of, collaboratories. We use CMOP’s Columbia River SATURN collaboratory as our testbed for ideas and their implementation and assessment.
THEME II: COASTAL MARGIN SCIENCE, wherein we address our high-level ecosystem questions (see above) through a combination of discovery- and hypothesis-based science.
THEME III: ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES, wherein we perceive the need for, then develop and demonstrate new enabling technologies in support of advanced functionality of SATURN and of river-to-ocean observatories in general (e.g., needed developments in modeling, sensors and platforms, and information and visualization).
