The Advisory Panel on Climate, Oceanographic Variability and Ecosystems (COVE) is focused on regional (shelf) to basin scale ecosystem processes and Pacific basin teleconnections. Even though COVE will keep all FUTURE key questions in mind while pursuing its activities, the purview of COVE is mainly the key questions (2) How do ecosystems respond to natural and anthropogenic forcing, and how might they change in the future? and (1) What determines an ecosystem’s intrinsic resilience and vulnerability to natural and anthropogenic forcing?

COVE will be associated initially with the following expert groups:

The expert groups associated with COVE should consider issues such as:

1. Identifying organisms and processes that are sensitive to perturbations such as: long-term trends in physical oceanography and changes in interannual (ENSO) and decadal (e.g., PDO, NPGO) variability; the interaction of natural climate variability and greenhouse gas influences; and regional or short-term events such as storms and tsunamis
   
2. Evaluating the intrinsic resiliency of ecosystems to pressures and perturbations, and understanding how ecosystem responses may be amplified or buffered through the influence of seasonal changes in physical (e.g., altered upwelling timing) and chemical conditions (e.g., hypoxia, eutrophication, ocean acidification), food-web dynamics, and other factors.

1. Understanding how natural and human perturbations cascade through ecosystems;
   
2. The relevance of key species concepts in North Pacific marine ecosystems and their sensitivity to perturbation;
   
3. Identifying amplifiers and buffers of perturbation effects in marine food webs and what scales and magnitudes of perturbations may induce irreversible ecosystem change;
   
4. Understanding the mechanisms of recruitment variation in populations of commercially valuable organisms such as finfish, shellfish, shrimp, squid, kelp, etc.