Narrator: This is Science Today. A newly established program called the California Current Ecosystem will look into the ecosystems off the California coast as never before. Mark Ohman, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, will lead the program. Ohman say the California Current site is a highly productive ecosystem that sustains a variety of life.

Ohman: It’s a fascinating part of our natural world and we need to understand that better to be able to manage it better. In a more practical sense, we depend on a variety of living marine resources from the California Current – a variety of fish populations, marine invertebrates, kelp forests and marine mammals and in order to sensibly manage their resources, we have to understand the dynamics of the ecosystem in which they function.

Narrator: The California Current Ecosystem site will benefit from more than 50 years of research conducted by the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations. For Science Today, I’m Larissa Branin.