Coastal areas comprise less than 20 percent of the contiguous United States, but they support more than half of the U.S. population. More than $1 trillion of coastal infrastructure are deployed in the U.S. alone every year.

But natural and manmade hazards in coastal areas, from severe weather and earthquakes to dredging and waste discharges, cost the U.S. more than $2 billion annually. In addition, reduction of wild salmon diversity in the Pacific Northwest is a dramatic example of ecosystem vulnerabilities that can only be defused by anticipating impacts decades before they manifest. The complexity of coastal margins presents enormous challenges for the sustainable management of one of the most productive environments available to humans.

The Science and Technology Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction (CMOP), supported by the National Science Foundation, will help society meet those challenges. CMOP research will be driven by key questions in coastal margin understanding: How do climate and climate change impact coastal margins? What roles do coastal margins play in global elemental cycles? How far seaward do human activities impact ecosystems?

CMOP's goal is to improve significantly our scientific understanding of the river-to-ocean environment characterized by highly complex interactions among watersheds, estuaries and the ocean's continental shelf. It will create new field observation and computer modeling technologies. It also will engage young people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, train a technologically savvy workforce for an emerging field and expand diversity in the field by increasing participation of underrepresented minorities and women. And CMOP will enable critical partnerships in the Pacific Northwest, including public-private partnerships to improve management of coastal margin environments, and industrial partnerships to capture economic development opportunities in an emerging field.

CMOP will ensure that the Pacific Northwest benefits from improvements in management of coastal margin environments and is a national leader in an emerging field of technology-driven economic development.