CMSI coordinates and promotes new collaborative approaches to research that engage stakeholders and meet the information needs of targeted end users to solve local, regional, and global challenges emerging in coastal systems.
CMSI will continue to be a leader in advancing diverse interdisciplinary research challenges that address important questions for coastal marine science, stakeholders, and the social and economic systems that depend on marine resources. Specifically, this approach identifies five major research themes representing grand challenges in coastal marine science in which 100+ CMSI researchers are providing extensive leadership in research. Broadly, these include:
- Connectivity between coastal and marine populations, communities, and ecosystems; and coupling between natural and human systems
- Sustainable management of marine resources, including fisheries and aquaculture production
- Historical, contemporary, and future impacts of climate change, harvesting, pollution, and other human activities on marine organisms, populations, ecosystems, and economies
- Adaptation to, and mitigation of, the impacts of rapidly changing coastal and marine environments and ecosystems
- Biodiversity and ecosystem resilience in a changing world
More specifically:
- Advances in understanding earth-surface systems, including rivers, oceans and coasts, coastal hazards, climate change and climate dynamics, and environmental and biological interactions
- Advances in the understanding of coastal upwelling systems and the physical, chemical, and biological drivers of ecosystem dynamics
- Advances in the understanding of the land-sea interface (including bay-delta and estuarine systems) and the physical/chemical and biological drivers of ecosystem dynamics
- Biological and physical models describing the connectivity of populations and the relationship to their environment
- Discoveries in changes in biodiversity, at all levels, on ecosystem functions and processes
- Discoveries in integrative organismal biology, evolution, and ecology
- Advances in the understanding of interactions among policies, human behavior, and political decisions in the context of environmental and natural resource uses
- New information, tools, technologies, and policy options developed and provided to natural resource management or regulatory agencies and industries