Seafloor habitats deeper than 100 meters make up an estimated 29% (1840 km2) of state waters in southern California, yet they are sampled with far less frequency when compared to shallower waters due to the many challenges associated with sampling in deep water. This difference in the frequency of sampling is concerning given the many economically and ecologically important organisms, along with the unique and productive habitats in which they occur, that are found below 100 m. With the creation of the new network of marine protected areas, over 35% (330 km2) of the State’s shelf and slope deeper than 100 m are now protected within State Marine Reserves and Conservation Areas. This dataset represents a multi-year study (September 2011 – January 2015) to characterize mid-depth rocky reef and soft bottom ecosystems in the California Marine Life Protection Act’s South Coast (SC) Study Region. The specific objective was to characterize the seafloor habitats and associated biological communities within and adjacent to the State Marine Reserves (SMRs) and Conservation Areas (SMCAs) at the time of implementation.

Learn about the biological, ecological, oceanographic, and socioeconomic conditions around the time of marine protected area (MPA) implementation on the North Coast. The North Coast region includes more than 1,000 square miles of state water from Point Arena to the California-Oregon border, and this report establishes a benchmark of conditions against which future changes can be compared. During the baseline monitoring period from 2013-2017, 11 projects worked across the North Coast to collect data and create a comprehensive understanding of the region. More than 30 organizations, including scientists, fishermen, tribal governments, citizen groups, and others, contributed to this summary report.

The objectives of this baseline study of rocky intertidal habitats along the North Coast Study Region (NCSR) are to (1) produce a quantitative baseline characterization of the structure of rocky intertidal ecosystems in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) established by the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), (2) provide an initial comparison between rocky intertidal ecosystems inside MPAs and nearby associated (unprotected) reference areas, (3) analytically explore baseline characterizations for potential indicators of the state of rocky intertidal ecosystems, (4) generate a fish biodiversity baseline within rocky tide pools at a few sites inside and outside of MPAs (for the first time) as well as (5) examine rockfish recruitment into these tide pools, and (6) integrate these assessments with other components of the baseline survey, including (7) high resolution topographic geological surveys, to inform the role and design of these programs for future monitoring and evaluation of MPAs.

Three remote sensing datasets were utilized to create the final substrate map products: 1) 4-banded imagery collected in June, October and November of 2012 by Keystone Aerial Mapping with its Microsoft UltraCam-X (used for 2012 intertidal and kelp mapping); 2) 4-banded imagery collected in December of 2011 by Ocean Imaging using its DMSC MK II sensor (used for 2011 kelp mapping); 3) Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) topographic data collected by Fugro Earth Data in March, 2010. The LiDAR dataset (providing high resolution topographical data of the intertidal zone) proved to be less useful for intertidal zone delineation than for the North Central California Coast (NCC). This was due to data format issues and some obvious errors in the SCR dataset in the lower intertidal to subtidal zones. However, the LiDAR dataset was used whenever possible. Field data and photographs collected for this project between 2013-2014 were also utilized to divide the terrestrial, intertidal and subtidal areas into subzones helping to create subzone-specific training sets used in the supervised classification procedure. Each subzone classification was then manually edited in order to ensure the highest accuracy product possible, and then mosaicked together into subregions of the overall SCR. The habitat classes this process confidently identified and mapped using the multispectral imagery for the sub/intertidal zones were: 1 - Whitewash/Undefined 2 - Water 3 - Sandy Beach 4 - Mixed Red/Brown Algae 5 - Shadow 6 - Terrestrial Vegetation 7 - Unvegetated Rock 8 - Beach Wrack 9 - Kelp/Brown Algae 10 - Blue-Green Algae 11 - Mixed Rock/Mussels/Barnacles/Anemone 12 - Cobble 13 - Man-made/Artificial 14 - Driftwood 15 - Surf Grass 17 - Eel Grass 21 - Green Algae 22 - Submerged Sandy Bottom 23 - Submerged Rock/Reef 24 - Deep Water