EXCO Meeting Minutes - March 1, 2000

URI's Coastal Institute Building

The meeting was call to order by Peter Wiebe, the ExCo chair, at 10 AM. Attending were Peter Wiebe, Diane Gifford, James Bisagni, Greg Lough, Robert Beardsley, Carin Ashjian, Robert Groman, David Townsend, Ted Durbin, and David Mountain. Larry Madin and Daniel Lynch were unable to attend. Michael Fogarty joined the group at about noon.

The agenda had only one item, review of the draft RFP for Phase IV. Peter called for any other agenda items. He suggested the additional items of reviewing the planning for workshops, a brief discussion of Northeast Consortium, and of the EuroOcean2000 meeting.

Northeast Consortium

A $2Mil pot of money (originated by the efforts of Senator Gregg -NH ), is available to support collaboration between researchers and fishers. A coordinating committee has been established to select projects for funding and is made up of about 30 individuals from industry, academia, non- government-organizations and government agencies. A call for letter proposals is on the street, with suggested areas for work being identified. The letter proposals are due March 10. The NE Fisheries Management Council also has about $4Mil to award for collaborative research by/with the fishing community. Next year there may be as much as $20Mil dedicated to this type of cooperative work. Opportunities for work are there and GLOBEC researchers should consider how/if they could/will participate. For more information go to: http:\\www.northeastconsortium.org\.

EurOcean 2000

A meeting that will take place in late August/early September in Hamburg Germany is a conference focused on marine science and ocean technology. It is a “...forum to advance the exchange of ideas across the boundaries of science, administration, and policy.” One of the key provisions is to “... improve the mechanisms of research and technology transfer into the applied domain”. There is a specific scientific and technical issue “GLOBEC related studies in the North Atlantic: A perspective for European and North American research cooperation?". It is anticipated that it will include discussions of the need for synthesis of the TASC results and to promote connections with GLOBEC – basically to generate interest and a source of funding to do this. Peter will be attending. For more information go to: http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/envsc/eurocean.html.

Of related interest, Peter handed out the announcement for a theme session at this year’s ICES Annual Science Conference titled “Theme Session on Environment – Plankton – Fish Linkages”, and encouraged GLOBEC investigators to consider submitting papers to the session. The Conference will be in Brugge, Belgium.

Update on Workshops

Bob Groman indicated that there is a new button on the GLOBEC web page for Data Workshops, listing and giving information about the workshops that were identified at the Ocean Sciences Meeting session. Peter indicated that reports of the workshops will be prepared shortly after they happen.

The kriging workshop will take place on March 6 and is full to the gills.

The zooplankton vital rates workshop will happen on April 24-25 at the National Academy of Sciences facility in Woods Hole. This is targeted specifically at zooplankton rates and interaction with the modelers. About a dozen investigators are anticipated.

A separate rates workshop will need to be arranged for larval fish. Plans are currently uncertain, but hopefully it will be sequential with the zooplankton workshop.

The Broad Scale workshop leaders intend to have a preliminary planning session in March to coordinate the workshop, scheduled to happen in the late spring or early summer.

The LTER workshop will have a preliminary planning session sometime in March.

Phase IV RFP Draft

A general feeling was expressed that in the current draft, circulated to ExCo members before the meeting, too much emphasis was placed on modeling to the exclusion of other types or steps in the synthesis of the observations. The wording should explicitly allow synthesis activities that are separate from numerical modeling.

A general feeling also was expressed that having the Canadian investigators who have participated in Phases I- III will be important to Phase IV, and that they should not be exclude from participating in Phase IV proposals.

Mike indicated that there was a need in the draft to highlight more directly the connection to climate.

A very extensive discussion took place about the ultimate goals of Phase IV, the types of activities that would be needed to accomplish them and how to structure and word the RFP to appropriately identify the areas of analysis. Rewriting of the Research Approach section will be done by groups of ExCo members over the next couple of weeks. Another ExCo meeting will be held on March 20 to complete the revision of the draft RFP. A final version is needed by mid-April to be presented at the national Scientific Steering Committee meeting.

The meeting adjourned at 3 PM.

Contributed by: David Mountain
Last modified: March 2, 2000