The Environmental Research Division (ERD) conducts research to understand the effects of natural environmental variability on marine resource populations. ERD’s broad research scope includes disciplines from physical oceanography, to fisheries biology, to mathematical modeling, using a cooperative team approach. This represents a unique resource for research in fisheries oceanography. Opportunities exist in the following areas: (1) specifying linkages of environmental processes to population dynamics of important fish stocks; (2) accounting for natural environmental variance, which currently obscures important signals (e.g., stock-recruitment relationships, multispecies interactions, habitat degradation, and/or pollution) essential for managing human impacts on marine populations; (3) developing methods to effectively forecast effects of environmental variations on ecosystem productivity and structure; (4) assessing the effects of global climate change on oceanographic processes important to fish populations; and (5) using new approaches and technologies to characterize and evaluate marine habitat. We are particularly interested in the application of remote-sensing technology to these problems as well as the application of electronic tags for evaluating habitat use in pelagic organisms.