NCCOS research featured prominently at last month's Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon. The biennial conference promotes scientific exchanges across a broad spectrum of marine science disciplines, as well as science education, outreach, and policy. Below are the abstracts of the presentations and posters that NCCOS scientists and their partners contributed to the meeting.

Science to management connections

• Southeast Deep coral Initiative: making meaningful connections to deep-water coral ecosystems in the Southeast U.S. Region
• Bridging the great divide while striking the right balance: how one funding program encourages management-to-science connections
• Early warning system of harmful algal blooms on Pacific Northwest Beaches – from ship to shore

Habitat characterization, monitoring, and mapping

• Deep-sea corals on the Southeast U.S.: Insights from NOAA's national database of deep-sea corals and sponges
• Structure-forming deep-sea coral abundance and diversity on the West Florida Shelf
• Utilization of simulated UAS imagery to assess the accuracy of structure from motion algorithms for bathymetric mapping
• Functional diversity descriptors are valuable tools to track spatio-temporal changes in the functional integrity of diverse habitats across the seascape
• Altered soundscapes help reveal Hurricane Maria's impact on three coral reef habitats on the coast of Puerto Rico
• Variability in nearshore and estuarine oceanographic conditions in the Northern Gulf of Alaska: 2004–2016
• Cluster analyses of harmful algal blooms using hyperspectral remote sensing data   
• Two new approaches for deploying a near real-time harmful algal bloom (HAB) detection system in remote environments
• A preliminary description of lionfish sound production characteristics in situ to inform the development of a passive acoustic method for monitoring invasive populations
• Evaluating and achieving consistency in OLCI and MERIS ocean color data products to advance watershed monitoring and time-series applications
• Legacy of short-term fertilization for salt marsh below-ground biogeochemical processes in Freeman Creek, North Carolina
• National Petroleum Reserve Alaska: physical drivers limiting coastal estuaries macroinvertebrate abundance, biomass and absence of adult species

Ocean acidification and change

• Suboptimal levels of aragonite saturation threaten the survival and maintenance of cold-water corals from the California Margin
• Oyster aquaculture in changing conditions: influence of saturation state on juvenile calcification

The American Geophysical Union, the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, and The Oceanography Society co-sponsored the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting.