POST- The Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Network: Description & Results from the 2004-05 Demonstration Phase

Moderators: Peggy Tsang and David Welch
Emails: peggy.tsang@vanaqua.org and david.welch@kintamaresearch.org

Date: Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Time: 8:00 am to 3:20 pm
Location: Egan 5

The Census of Marine Life (www.coml.org) is a world-wide effort to initiate a new era of scientific research in the ocean. One of the Census' 13 field projects involves the development of POST, a continental-scale acoustic tracking array that would for the first time allow tracking individual animals from salmon smolts to blue whales anywhere along the west coast of North America. The array will provide a tool for marine scientists equivalent to that of the Hubble Space Telescope, enabling scientists to “see” into the ocean in a way never before possible. Capabilities of the array include providing direction, speed of movement, depth, and position at sea (to within 1 km) for individual animals as small as 11 cms, and to directly measure the survival of migrating fish in different regions of the coastal ocean. The array will also provide a powerful observational platform for hosting a wide range of oceanographic sensors, providing for the first time a wide-spread permanent monitoring system for the continental shelf and slope regions of the world's oceans akin to the land-based meteorological stations monitoring the world's weather. This symposium will describe the performance of the POST array during the 2004-05 demonstration period, and its capability to directly measure migration and survival of a wide range of study populations. The complete results from the 2004 field season will be reported, along with the initial results from the 2005 final year of the demonstration period. The symposium will also sponsor a forum for fisheries scientists to discuss how such an array could be used in the study of the migrations of marine and anadromous animals. The panel discussion will provide time for audience input and the identification and discussion of additional issues identified by the audience, particularly related to the “Mosaic” theme of the conference.

Link to list of presentations in this symposium

Sponsor:

Census of Marine Life