Fisheries Ecology, Conservation and Management from Sierra to the Sea

Developing sustainable solutions for the most pressing and controversial problems in fisheries requires a new scope of integration that surpasses the advances within specific disciplines and geographic boundaries. What is needed is an innovative, comprehensive and holistic framework, what we are calling the Sierra-to-the-Sea (S2S), that explicitly links the key iconic features of California: the Sierra Nevada mountains, Central Valley, the Delta, San Francisco Bay, and the coastal ocean, while building on the strengths of existing centers and projects at UC Davis, including the Tahoe Environmental Research Center, the Center for Watershed Sciences, and the Bodega Marine Laboratory. The emphasis of the newly established Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute (CMSI) at UC Davis is on connectivity among locations, populations and disciplines along the S2S continuum: between places in the coastal ocean, between the land and sea, working across freshwater and marine habitats, and between physical, biological and human aspects of the environment. By leverage existing strengths, CMSI hopes to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations in the physical, biological and social sciences along the continuum of land, freshwater, coastal and ocean environments to help catalyze meaningful advances in fisheries ecology, conservation and management.