COMMERCE
Subscriber Services
Classified Ads
Subscribe
Advertise
NEWS
This Month
Editorial
Letters
F/V Safety
Past Issues
ABOUT US
Contact Us
Latest Issue
Subscribe
History
MORE CONTENT
CFN Archives
Links
Each month exclusively in the PRINT edition of CFN
Along the Coast
Ask the Lobster Doc
Bearin’s
Classifieds
Coming Events
Editorial
Enforcement Report
FISH SAFE
Fleet Additions
Letters
Lobster Market Report
New Boats
News Catch
Quahog Market Report
|
Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 37 Number 4
December 2009
NOAA creates ecosystem research partnership
WOODS HOLE, MA – Federal government and academic marine scientists in the Northeast are combining resources in a new effort to better understand how the large marine ecosystem off the Northeast functions.
The Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region (CINAR) was officially launched this summer by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) following an intensive competitive proposal process.
The institute is made up of these partners: the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which is leading the partnership; Rutgers University; the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science; the University of Maine; and the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
Between NOAA researchers and those who work for CINAR partner institutions, more than 200 ocean scientists may eventually work on institute projects.
“The Northeast shelf is one of the most studied and best known marine ecosystems in the world,” said Don Anderson, senior scientist at WHOI and CINAR director.
“This institute provides a way to harness that knowledge and focus it on understanding ecosystem processes as a whole, even predicting how it will change and what factors drive that change, particularly climate,” he said.
Although the institute is new, the partner institutions are already working on several projects with NOAA funding that was in the pipeline, Anderson explained.
Among these projects are efforts to: apply advanced technologies to the next generation of fishery stock surveys; understand whether there is a link between marine mammal health and the risk of entanglement in fishing gear; better predict the occurrence and intensity of harmful algal blooms such as red tide in Northeast coastal waters; and test and evaluate new forms of fishery management.
Bigger picture
The National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center staff will be among the scientists actively involved in institute projects. Center Director Nancy Thompson said she welcomed the partnership organization.
“Much of what we do is related to managing fisheries, recovering species, and protecting habitats from harm and overuse,” Thompson said. “We’re reforming our own scientific focus along ecosystem lines and welcome the additional capability the institute can provide.”
For example, she explained, fishery scientists everywhere recognize that resource managers need a full picture of the processes that influence marine life if they are to effectively reduce risks and uncertainties in stock assessments that can cost fishing businesses time and money.
“That means not only understanding an individual species but also its competitors, all the things it eats, and the physical, nutritional, and climactic factors that affect the world in which it lives,” said Thompson. “That’s the future of fisheries management. Compared with many other places in the world, we in the Northeast are well-positioned to actually do it.”
Climate
Anderson added that climate is something just now being understood in a way that can be applied to resource management issues.
“Climate permeates all the other topics,” he said. “You can’t manage these fisheries or study them without a deep understanding of climate – both regional and global – and the changes that are coming.”
Anderson said that the institute partner organizations are in a position to monitor climate-related parameters in all the world’s oceans.
“Plus, we have extensive data collections, as well as the instruments and infrastructure to collect more data, and numerical modeling capabilities that encompass weather, climate, hydrography, and ecosystems,” he said.
First projects
As the institute moves forward, the goal is for CINAR scientists to work closely with NOAA investigators to plan future projects and programs and to work together to find funding for the work.
Examples of future projects include studies of climate-related ocean acidification caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and marine spatial planning, which is similar to land-use planning but focused on specific marine habitats or systems.
The institute also hopes to develop and deploy arrays of underwater vehicles and instruments to continuously monitor the ocean as part of a growing ocean observatory network.
Central to these efforts will be arrays of meteorological and hydrographic sensors deployed in the equatorial Pacific and other areas far from the Northeast US.
But, CINAR said in a late-September statement, that is where measurements are needed “to understand global climate processes that ultimately affect this region and its valuable fisheries and ecosystems.”
Back to story list
|
|
Tell us what you think.
