CI-CORE Partners

CI-CORE is built on the strengths five CSU campuses and their scientists in northern and central California. Partnerships have also been established with other research institutes nationwide. These institutions and their specific strengths are:

San José State University/Moss Landing Marine Laboratories will serve as the administrative headquarters for the CI-CORE program, housing both the Chair of the Advisory Council and the Program Coordinator. MLML will also maintain the website, establish the foundation architecture and provide critical links to other programs through the COTS network. MLML will take the lead in acquisition and analysis of high resolution remote sensing imagery of the California coast, in collaboration with institutional partners at Cal Poly SLO, CSUMB and the Florida Environmental Research Institute (FERI) which operates the OceanPHILLS imaging spectrometer. MLML will also participate in the development of moored instrumentation technology to be deployed at various locations throughout the observatory, in collaboration with SFSU/RTCES.

California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo will support CI-CORE in three primary areas: (i) validation/calibration of hyperspectral remote sensing imagery collected by MLML/FERI; (ii) further development of the on campus capacity for processing and analyses of geospatial information provided through this CI-CORE effort for use by all the participating CSU campuses, and (iii) further develop Cal Poly’s coastal Marine Science Center for support of the validation/calibration of the hyperspectral remote sensing imagery and time-series measurements.

California State University Monterey Bay will take the lead in developing a suite of spatial data modeling, image processing and GIS tools that can be used in the fusion of high-resolution seafloor habitat data with hyperspectral imagery for CI-CORE. The value of this approach will be to leverage and greatly extend the utility of each of these cutting-edge technologies in coastal environmental monitoring and change detection programs. The Earth Systems Science and Policy program at CSUMB already has a strong geospatial technology curriculum emphasizing the application of GIS and remote sensing to coastal marine and watershed issues.

San Francisco State University/Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies will develop a basic environmental monitoring system for continuous monitoring of temperature, salinity, chl a, dissolved O2, turbidity, weather, irradiance, currents, nutrients and zooplankton abundance. The first package will be deployed on the RTCES pier, in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Data will be streamed to the website for easy access by a variety by a variety of investigators. Subsequent packages will be distributed to CI-CORE partner institutions for deployment in a variety of sites throughout California.

Humboldt State University will (i) identify and compile historical and ongoing long-term datasets within the Marine Science programs at HSU; (ii) provide start-up support for pilot and ongoing monitoring programs that have been identified as target programs for future CI-CORE related funding in subsequent years; and (iii) establish a pier-based data logging station in Humboldt Bay, in collaboration with SJSU/MLML and SFSU/RTCES. Examples of long-term investigations and data sets include beach and intertidal biological studies at various coastal locations, marine mammal surveys, algal and invertebrate surveys in Humboldt Bay, long term (10 years) data base of fishes associated with eelgrass beds in Humboldt Bay.

The Florida Environmental Research Institute (FERI) is a private, non-profit research institute based in Tampa, Florida. As part of an ONR Environmental Optics program (Coupling simulated ocean reflectance to the atmospheric correction of hyperspectral images, N00014-00-1-0514), and NRL (Code 7212) and NOAA NOS Remote Sensing Division research efforts we have developed the tools, techniques, and collaborations to calibrate and deploy a hyperspectral imaging spectrometer (Ocean PHILLS II, Davis et al., 2002) that produces hyperspectral remote sensing data at the signal-to-noise level necessary for coastal ocean imaging spectroscopy (Kohler et al., 2002). This effort has led to a radiometric calibration technique that does not require the use of subjective tuning parameters to retrieve upwelling radiance at the sensor from raw digital count data. Our collaboration has also led to the deployment of the Ocean PHILLS on a high altitude aircraft (10,000 m), which provides near-synoptic imagery, over spatial scales (~4000 km) that are relevant to coastal ocean processes. This effort seeks to deploy the PHILLS imaging system and spectroscopy techniques to the coast of California in order to help build a coastal observing system for the near-shore environment.