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The eastern Bering Sea supports productive marine ecosystems and extraordinarily rich marine resources. These resources include vast numbers of marine birds and mammals - among which are federally protected species - and productive stocks that provide subsistence foods for local communities and generate more than 50% of all commercial fish and shellfish landings in the United States. The productive and ecologically diverse Bering Sea is economically and culturally important, yet these marine ecosystems are changing. Mounting
evidence of physical and biological changes in the Bering Sea
marine ecosystems, including the loss of seasonal sea ice, has
raised concerns and stimulated collaborative research efforts
by several agencies, including the NOAA Fisheries Oceanography
Coordinated Investigation (FOCI)
program, the North Pacific Research Board (NPRB), the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service (USFWS),
and the National Marine Mammal Laboratory (NMML). One
of these efforts is the Bering
Ecosystem Study (BEST), supported by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs.
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In recent years it has become increasingly apparent that the ecosystems of the eastern Bering Sea, spanning from the Aleutians to St. Lawrence Island, and from the inner shelf to the slope, are changing concurrently with fluctuations in the climate patterns of the region. These ecosystem changes have important ecological implications for the productivity and the food webs of the Bering Sea, ranging from planktonic organisms to the upper trophic level fish and marine mammals targeted by subsistence and commercial harvests (NOAA'sBering Climate Web-site). These ecological changes are also likely to impact the social, economic, and cultural systems of the people dependent on Bering Sea resources. Thus, an understanding of coupled physical - biological - social dynamics is essential for the sustainable management of eastern Bering Sea resources in the face of future ecological, social, economic, and cultural change. |
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What is BEST ?
The goal of the Bering
Ecosystem Study (BEST) Program is to develop an end-to-end mechanistic
understanding of how climate change will affect the marine ecosystems of
the eastern Bering Sea, the continued use of their resources, and the
social, economic and cultural sustainability of the people who depend on
them.
BEST is motivated by the realization that the Bering Sea is in the midst of significant, interrelated physical and biological change that may impact the region's carrying capacity and productivity, the sustainability of fish and shellfish stocks of great economic value for the nation, and the livelihoods of Native communities and fishers. These changes involve climate forcing, physical properties and processes in the ocean, and biological responses from the level of the physiology of individual organisms to the structure and function of entire ecosystems. In response to these anticipated changes, the BEST Program will develop field research in the Bering Sea to assess how climate change will affect the ecosystems of the Bering Sea and their ability to support sustainable fisheries.
What is the focus of the BEST program ?
In developing the BEST Implementation Plan, the BEST Science Steering Committee (SSC) focused and prioritized these broad objectives into three research priorities:
1: What is the impact of the on-going decrease in seasonal sea ice on the eastern Bering Sea marine ecosystem?
2: What is the influence of summer stratification on the magnitude and fate of primary and secondary production?
3: What processes control nutrient replenishment
over the shelf, and are they sensitive to the observed
warming?
The BEST Science Plan, published in October 2004, provides background information and frames the science questions to guide future integrated studies of eastern Bering Sea marine ecosystems. The proposed research focuses on the mechanisms and processes that determine the magnitude and the fate of the biological production, as it is transferred through the ecosystem to upper-trophic-level consumers, including humans. The Science Plan has been followed by an implementation planning process, and if funding and ships are available, a 3-year field program beginning in the spring of 2007.
It is hoped that in addition to BEST, there will be a series of international, collaborative programs that will facilitate comparisons between the eastern and western Bering Sea, the Oyashio Current System and the Sea of Okhotsk that will involve researchers from Japan, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Korea, and the United States. These studies are anticipated to be coordinated through the new International GLOBEC program, Ecosystem studies of Sub-Arctic Seas (ESSAS). A Japanese contribution to this effort has already been funded (J-ESSAS).
To complement the BEST natural science research program, a social sciences research plan has been developed with support from the NSF Arctic Social Sciences program, to investigate how humans use and organize themselves around the Bering Sea system. This program will seek to develop a broader understanding of the social and scientific needs of the communities around the Bering Sea, based on an understanding of the traditional knowledge of these communities and the coupled dynamcis of natural and social systems.
Last modified: 2006-07-14