R.Jones

This project demonstrates a successful partnership for a cooperative, industry-based contribution to monitoring of the coastal pelagic ecosystem in the western Gulf of Maine. The need for long-term biological data collection in the Gulf of Maine is critical in light of the potential for climate change and accompanying ecosystem change at both the regional and global scale. It is increasingly important for the fishing industry as decisions about fishery management shift from a single or multi-species to an ecosystem-based approach. In this final report, we describe the major results of a two year time series of hydrographic and zooplankton and ichthyoplankton data carried out between January, 2007- December, 2008 at five fixed stations in the western Gulf of Maine. We place these results in the context of an overview of the entire five year time (2003-2008, excluding 2006) series collected as part of the PULSE project supported in previous years by the Northeast Consortium. The sampling for the 2007-08 time series was undertaken totally by the fishing industry, and analysis of samples was conducted at the University of Maine, Gulf of Maine Research Institute laboratory. This is the first recorded time series for the western Gulf of Maine showing both seasonal and interannual variabilit