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ST. LOUIS, Mo. - The events of the past year - disrupted fisheries, torrential rains and catastrophic hurricanes - provide ample evidence of the close ties between oceans and human welfare, and illustrate a broad range of the services that marine ecosystems provide, many of which are being destroyed or radically altered.

Only an ecosystem-based approach to understanding and managing the oceans will succeed in protecting or restoring the key ecological, climatic, recreational and fishery functions that people too often take for granted, said Jane Lubchenco, the Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology at Oregon State University.

"Marine ecosystems do not exist apart from humans," Lubchenco said, in a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "We have significant impacts on the oceans and they, in turn, have profound effects on us. So it's critical that we do a better job of monitoring and studying the oceans, and create ways to manage the full suite of activities that affect them. Sustaining the range of services that oceans provide is essential to our future well-being."

An integrated approach such as this is just beginning in California, where laws now require that various state agencies coordinate their management of ocean activities to achieve a range of social, economic and ecological goals. Lubchenco proposed expanding this concept to a regional approach to integrated management, using collaborations across states that share a large marine ecosystem.

"It's time that Washington, Oregon and California work together to protect and restore their shared ocean ecosystem," she said. Other states and ultimately the federal government could learn from that approach, she said, and try to move beyond thinking of one special interest at a time.

"In the past, the management of each major activity - energy extraction, fishing, recreation, coastal development, watershed and other uses - has been independent of the others," Lubchenco said. "There is increasing recognition that managing them more holistically will be more effective."

Many similar points have been made in three recent major reports, Lubchenco said, by the Pew Oceans Commission, the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Those studies point to decades of overfishing, pollution, coastal development, and poor land-use practices that have brought many oceans to a crisis state. But many people still do not appreciate how vulnerable the ocean ecosystems are and the tremendous affects they have on people's lives, Lubchenco said.

Last summer, the coasts off of Washington, Oregon and California experienced a bizarre two-month delay in the onset of winds and associated upwelling of nutrients from the deep ocean. This upwelling normally provides the stimulus for the rich and productive waters off the coast.

The lack of nutrients resulted in a 60 per cent decline in the amount of microscopic plants in the ocean waters. Fewer plants meant fewer small animals and other ripple effects on the food web. Dead seabirds, low fish catches, a delayed crab season and emaciated gray whales were some of the consequences. This unusual upwelling pattern wreaked havoc on a marine ecosystem that ordinarily is one of the more productive in the world.

Although cause and effect cannot yet be proven, such disruptions would be consistent with what scientists expect as a result of global warming, Lubchenco said.

Global warming is happening while other disruptions are also occurring, she said. Elsewhere in the world, large outbreaks of toxic and stinging jellyfish or harmful algal blooms may reflect local marine changes. Increasing amounts of dust blowing off the deserts of Africa have been linked to a fungus that is killing coral reefs in the Caribbean Sea. Many major fisheries are near collapse. And some of the most damaging hurricanes in human history last year rampaged through the tropical Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and other locations - their intensity caused by warmer ocean waters that some researchers also believe is linked to global warming.

"In addition to more integrated approaches to ocean activity management and reduction of greenhouse gases, new scientific programs and monitoring are needed to recover the bounty and resilience of the oceans," Lubchenco said.

One model research program is provided by PISCO - the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Study of Coastal Oceans, a research consortium of OSU and three California universities on marine ecosystem processes off the West Coast of the United States. In the past seven years it has conducted millions of dollars of research, dozens of publications and is beginning to answer complex questions about marine management over broad geographic areas.