UC Santa Cruz has received nearly $7.5 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) to vault scientific research on imperiled Pacific salmon populations into one of the nation’s most powerful collaborations between the agency and academia to save the vital species.
The transformational funding will support and expand a longstanding joint effort between UC Santa Cruz and NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center—a partnership that the agency sees as one of the most robust of its 16 collaborative research institutes, which spans 80 universities across the country.
“The aim of the work is to create new tools that can evaluate the effectiveness and cost of different recovery strategies and fill critical information gaps,” said Steve Lindley, director of the center’s fisheries ecology division, based in Santa Cruz. “This will include work across all the habitats that salmon use over the course of their lives—rivers, estuaries, and the ocean.”
The division awarded six grants to four NOAA cooperative institutes, with the largest ($7.48 million) going to UC Santa Cruz. Currently, university researchers across disciplines—including molecular ecology, fisheries biology, and climate science—work closely with NOAA scientists through the UC Santa Cruz Fisheries Collaborative Program (FCP). And with this funding, they will produce transformative research in support of science-based salmon-recovery plans.
Salmon populations in California have been declining for decades. "Transforming the future for Pacific salmon requires new thinking, and that is where the UC Santa Cruz-NOAA collaboration really shines,” said professor and FCP director Eric Palkovacs, associate vice chancellor for research at UC Santa Cruz. “We have fully integrated research teams working on the biggest challenges, developing and field testing new restoration approaches.”
Advancing Science to Save Salmon
Salmon are a vital resource along the West Coast, with important cultural, economic and ecosystem benefits. Overfishing, climate change, predation, and loss of habitat have pushed some populations to the brink of extinction. Currently, salmon and steelhead are considered threatened or endangered across much of their native range along the Pacific Coast. NOAA is striving to bring these populations back to sustainable levels to support fisheries, tribal uses, and ecosystems.
From mountain rivers to the open ocean, salmon exist across a range of ecosystems and face a variety of threats throughout their lives. This presents enormous challenges for their recovery. This funding will help scientists better understand these pressures, strengthening current knowledge and advancing the cutting edge of salmon science to support recovery.
At UC Santa Cruz, the funding will provide critical support for the fisheries collaborative in nearly a dozen distinct areas, ranging from an evaluation of current reintroduction techniques for salmon in California, to understanding the adaptive capacity of these fish to climate-related stressors, the genomics of California salmon and steelhead trout, and more.
The NOAA grants include support for undergraduate and graduate student researchers and postdoctoral scholars, representing a crucial investment to train the next generation of scientists. For example, Paige Gardner, a graduate-student researcher at UC Santa Cruz, studies the genetic underpinnings of heat tolerance in steelhead to reveal which populations might be most resilient to climate change.
Her work, alongside dozens of other projects, will inform cohesive tools to improve forecasts of salmon returns and identify impactful recovery actions. “I am very fortunate to collaborate with such an incredible network of scientists at both UC Santa Cruz and NOAA,” Gardner said.
Partners in salmon recovery
In total, NOAA Fisheries awarded more than $9.2 million in grants funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to academic partners that will help recover threatened and endangered Pacific salmon. These grants are part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s unprecedented $27 million investment in Pacific salmon recovery science, and they will support research that will build upon decades of knowledge from NOAA and its state, tribal, and academic partners.
The power of IRA funding is that it supports research in a more coordinated way than in the past, with the flexibility to be put toward different projects under one initiative while still encouraging collaboration among the various teams. Previously, funding came in disaggregated pieces, according to Ann-Marie Osterback, an associate project scientist at UC Santa Cruz and part of the fisheries collaborative.
“These isolated projects have goals and deliverables that are specific to that funding agency, and typically do not include ways to support linking research findings to other research groups,” Osterback explained. “With IRA funding, we can make sure that we collect and communicate our research data in ways that are accessible and transparent to other researchers. Through this type of collaboration, we can gain orders of magnitude more insight into factors that support salmon recovery than we could with just evaluating each research project in isolation.”
The other cooperative institutes are located at the University of Washington, Oregon State University, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
