The figure above illustrates funding for WMRS operations (yellow and pink lines), research programs (blue line) and total station use (black line) since 1990. In the late 1990’s, our mandate was to enhance the academic environment at the Station so we recruited research scientists who ran grants through WMRS, which increased extramural funding. WMRS also ran its own educational programs, which further increased use and recharge income. Following the 15-Year Review and 25-30% cumulative budget cuts starting in 2002, our priority changed to sustaining the facilities for recharge use by campus-based programs. This explains the dip in extramural income to WMRS, which has actually been sustained at a fairly high level by virtue of winning some new grants for facility improvements (NOTE-extramural in this figure only includes funding to WMRS programs and not funding for campus-based research). Use of the station also dipped with the initial budget cuts in 2001 and appears to be more volatile now as other programs are experiencing various budget limitations. Note the continued reliance of the station on recharge income (yellow line) for approximately 1/3 of the operating budget.

Publications based on research done at a field station are a traditional measure of research productivity. The WMRS bibliography, newly revised in 2010, includes about 2000 publications, approximately half of which are peer-reviewed journal articles. Since 1996, when the unit moved to UCSD, 761 new publications have been added to the WMRS bibliography, including 33 Masters or Doctoral theses and 472 journal articles. The annual average is over 50 publications per year in the "modern era" starting in 1985. Actual counts for each year may be found in the excel spreadsheet "publication counts.xls". It typically takes several years to capture all of the publications for a given year so the post-2005 trend is not representative of decreased scholarly productivity at WMRS. The WMRS publications database is available on-line . Please note that we did not include publications that have only a loose affiliation with WMRS. For example, the UC Irvine atmospheric chemistry group collects several hundred gallons of liquid air at Crooked Creek very year, for use in standardized measurements of air composition around the world. This standard has contributed to over 150 publications which we have not included in the WMRS publications database.

List of available annual reports since 1950

Since WMRS was founded in 1950, there has been a changing format for annual reporting. The list below shows years for which we have copies of annual reports. Note the switch from fiscal to calendar year in 1996. The "RAMS report" refers to the automated summary provided by the Reservations Administration System (RAMS - administered by the UC Natural Reserve System) which we use to keep track of reservations and station use. As of 2009, the list below refers only to materials located in the archives at WMRS. There are additonal archives in the WMRS special collection at the UCSD library which may yield materials from the early years.