California Sea Grant College Program

Marine ecosystems provide basic and fundamental living resources for hu-mans [1]. Of these resources, perhaps the ones with the most direct influence on human life are fishes and the associated fisheries around the globe. In regard to fish populations in the ocean, there has been increasing evidence showing that many of these resources are being significantly depleted [2, 3], and new strategies of ecosystem-based management and marine protected areas (MPAs) are being recommended [1, 4, 5]. For zooplankton, research has demonstrated a strong correlation between increasing Sea Surface Temperature due to global warming and zooplankton abundance [6], and populations of the California Current have declined by 80 % during the last 60 years [7]. As the complexities of ecosystem management increase with the changes to management paradigms and the need to collect comprehensive data grows, new technologies must be developed, including advanced remote sensing methods for animal abundance estimation [8].