ExCo Meeting
February 26, 2001

Location: Southeastern Massachusetts University, Dartmouth, MA

Attending: Peter Weibe, Bob Beardsley, David Townsend, Ted Durbin, Jim Bisagni, Diane Gifford, Greg Lough, Bob Groman and David Mountain

Peter introduced the agenda:

  1. Input to the international GLOBEC brochure
  2. Discussion of the Phase IV AO

Two additional topics were added - a report of a visualization workshop and discussion of an LTER.

1) International GLOBEC brochure:

We have been asked to prepare a two page highlight of what we have learned in our GLOBEC program. What should be included? One point that be might be made is that Calanus is not resident to Georges Bank, although this is true of other regions being studied, as well. We should focus on the original program objectives - Climate change and population dynamics. Possible specific issues mentioned in discussion were:

Pseudocalanus being two species and the potential implications this may have on food availability to cod and haddock larvae

One approach would be to make a time line of events/characteristics through the 5 year period of the program wind, salinity, zoo abundance, gadid egg/larval abundance, etc. However, a response to International GLOBEC is needed sooner than this likely could be put together.

The main themes of the program should be addressed - physical/biological coupling; climate change; basic physiological rates in context of population dynamics of target species; modeling.

Peter and Bob B. will take input from the rest of the group to develop a draft document.

2) Phase IV AO:

A copy of the draft AO was circulated. (See the on-line version at the GLOBEC National web site) The AO would have been issued about Jan 20, but the new administration put a hold on Federal Register announcements. Now it can be released. One question is when should be the due date. The original date of May 1 is felt to be too early to allow development of a series of good proposals. July 10 is recommended as the due date. This recommendation will be forwarded to Beth Turner, for her consideration.

Organizing Phase IV meetings and proposal preparations - how to do this?

To foster getting groups together, what meetings/workshops should be organized? In the past an open meeting was held to provide background information and begin forming groups that would submit proposals. This seems an appropriate approach. Looking at the week of April 9 for a two day meeting. A note to ggball will be made to get an indication if certain days are obviously better than others. Also a one day meeting will be held to lay the groundwork for the open meeting. It will involve ExCo and leaders of the various workshops that were held last year in preparation for Phase IV and be open to anyone else who wants to attend. This planning meeting will be held on March 14.

The program's data management activities seem to be supported for the coming years, but not the funding of workshops. Past workshops have been funded largely by registration fees from the attendees, although the Program Service Office has contributed to insure everything happened. A proposal may have to be considered to continue this type of support during Phase IV.

Location for the April meeting was not determined. WHOI, URI, or Mass Maritime are possibilities that will be checked. The first choice will be the fifth floor of Clarke at WHOI.

3) Visualization Workshop:

A visualization workshop was held on the last day of fall to discuss methods for visualizing data from the program. Colin Ware from Larry Mayer's group at UNH demonstrated visualization capabilities they have developed for multibeam data. Some aspects of this system could be useful for the GLOBEC program. The hard part is to get data sets that are irregular in time and space (i.e., GLOBEC data) to interface with the existing software tailored for more uniform kinds of data. Skip Little of WHOI is looking into bridging that gap with some selected GLOBEC data sets. We need to better define the types of visualizations we will want to do. Anyone who has ideas in this area should send a written description of this need to Peter Wiebe, so it can be considered in this effort.

4) LTER

A workshop was to be held to consider a LTER in the Gulf of Maine/Georges Bank system. It has not yet taken place, but the effort should continue. Planning for an LTER proposal could benefit from the work to be done under Phase IV.

The meeting adjourned at 2 PM.

Contributed by D. Mountain
February 27, 2001