WHAT IS CI-CORE?

Managing the commercial, recreational and environmental burdens placed on California’s coastal resources by agriculture, industry and urban development requires better understanding of coastal ocean dynamics. To this end, the California State University (CSU) has established CI-CORE. Leveraging the expertise of CSU institutional partners, the CI-CORE observatory will be distributed along the entire 1200 miles of California coastline. This distribution uniquely positions CI-CORE to address the variety of challenges to coastal environmental quality, including watershed alteration, shoreline erosion, chemical contamination of food webs, depletion of fish stocks, toxic plankton blooms, marine-borne pathogens, and the rapid invasion of coastal and estuarine waters by non-indigenous species.

The CSU CI-CORE program represents an applied coastal research alliance dedicated to the development of nationally relevant solutions to the challenges facing our marine and estuarine environments. CI-CORE was established in 2002 through the NOAA Coastal Observation Technology System (COTS) in partnership with six other institutions/programs nationwide. CI-CORE is integrated with other observatory programs locally, regionally and nationally, to collectively help satisfy the mandate of the US Integrated and Sustained Ocean Observing System (ISOOS) as articulated by Oceans.US and other state and federal programs, including NOAA and NOPP.

The specific long-term objectives of CI-CORE are to:

• Establish research & monitoring infrastructure of critical coastal habitats in California for integration into global ocean monitoring efforts;
• Conduct research on problems that affect the economic and environmental well-being of California;
• Develop models for predicting change in coastal environments;
• Enhance management capability of regulatory & resource management agencies for sustainable use of the coastal zone; and
• Enhance public awareness of the importance of coastal management.

Unique to CI-CORE’s approach to delivering timely, indispensable and appropriate environmental data to the regulatory agencies responsible for coastal management policies will be the development of web-based, geo-referenced time series of environmental observations.