Who monitors the tide pools?

There are a number of local government agencies, consulting firms, and private groups that are monitoring various locations along the coast of California. The largest partnership of monitoring programs is the Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Network (MARINe), which monitors a core of over 100 different locations along the west coast of North America, a majority within California, using standardized procedures. MARINe is a consortium of local, state, and federal government agencies, universities, and private groups charged with coordinating and carrying out the monitoring program. At some locations, monitoring has been active since the 1980s. The monitoring locations are sampled (see Survey Methods: www.pacificrockyintertidal.org) to ensure comparisons among sites with the overarching goal of understanding tide pool conditions and how plant and animal populations fluctuate over time.

The Partnership of Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) is another large consortium that conducts monitoring in tide pool habitats, as well as other coastal ecosystems. PISCO consists of numerous researchers from various universities along the western US coast that work together with MARINe for much of the tide pool monitoring. PISCO monitors several biological and physical factors at over 100 sites along the west coast of North America from Alaska to Baja California, with some sites overlapping with MARINe long-term monitoring sites. Surveys are conducted to determine biodiversity and community composition of rocky shoreline habitats (cbsurveys.ucsc.edu).