Partership For Interdisciplinary Studies Of Coastal Oceans (PISCO)

In January 1999, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation awarded a grant to Oregon State University to fund PISCO, the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, which is a long-term ecological consortium. PISCO was created to overcome two major impediments to conserving marine ecosystems: a lack of understanding of the basic processes governing the essential features of coastal systems, and ineffective transfer of new scientific knowledge to the public and to policy makers. PISCO is predicated on the idea that research, policy, and education should be intimately linked. Our objectives are:

  • To understand the processes and mechanisms underlying the dynamics of coastal ecosystems along the U.S West Coast;
  • To incorporate sound science into effective management and conservation measures by communicating with the public and policy makers; and
  • To initiate a novel program in interdisciplinary training and research.
PiscoMap
PISCO is a consortium of scientists at four universities: Oregon State University, the Universities of California at Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, and Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. OSU, UCSC and UCSB coordinate the ship-based, shore-based and remotely sensed ecological monitoring and experimental research, and provide leadership in policy and outreach. Stanford coordinates the Consortium’s graduate and post-graduate training efforts and coordinates workshops about new, interdisciplinary scientific techniques. PISCO principal investigators at OSU are Jane Lubchenco and Bruce Menge.

PISCO studies rocky shores and the adjacent waters 0–10 km from shore, along the West Coast of the contiguous U.S. Rocky shores are some of the richest of all marine habitats and the focus of myriad conservation efforts. The PISCO study area encompasses several biogeographic boundaries where abrupt changes in species distribution, community composition, and biodiversity occur.

The southward-flowing California Current System, which dominates the region that PISCO studies, exhibits potentially significant variation from north to south at scales of hundreds of kilometers and on temporal scales of decades. Variation has been identified in currents, upwelling, temperature, El Niño events, climate, zooplankton abundance and transport, and the patterns of benthic biota. PISCO is working to synthesize this knowledge across habitat boundaries and traditional scientific disciplines.

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