Plan for the Phase IV Synthesis of the GLOBEC Georges Bank Program

Phase IV of the US GLOBEC Georges Bank program will synthesize the results from the program’s earlier phases to provide an integrated understanding of the population dynamics of key, target species and evaluate how a varying climate may influence these populations. Following the program’s Implementation Plan (GLOBEC Report 6, http://www.usglobec.org/), each earlier phase focused field studies on a particular physical process and the influence of that process on the bank’s biology: Phase I - stratification, Phase II - source/retention/loss of water and organisms from the Bank, Phase III - cross frontal exchange. Bank-scale survey and moored sampling was conducted each year of the program to provide time series of the physical conditions and of the distribution/abundance of the biological populations on the bank. In addition a modeling component has been supported throughout the program to develop models for investigating the bank’s bio/physical dynamics and to provide a rigorous framework for synthesizing the results from the program.

Synthesis of the large amount of data collected will be done in incremental steps (by necessity and by logic). Different groups of researchers likely will need to collaborate at different stages of the synthesis. This plan presents a structure and a timeline to guide synthesis activities and to provide opportunities for researchers to collaborate for achieving the specific objectives as the synthesis activities progress.

Each year a series of related workshops will be held to focus on a particular step in the synthesis. Each workshop will focus on a specific topic with a set of specific objectives. At the end of each year a symposium will be held to present the products of these integrated analyses. The last year of the synthesis will be dedicated to the production of book that will present the overall results of the program and address the original programmatic goals articulated in the Implementation Plan. The workshops are expected to last 2-3 days and the symposia, 3-5 days.