Workshop Announcement: Characterizing Changing Ocean Conditions Affecting Resilience of Coastal Communities, Land and Ocean Use

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Workshop Announcement: Characterizing Changing Ocean Conditions Affecting Resilience of Coastal Communities, Land and Ocean Use

MARACOOS, working with MARCO and partners, will convene a workshop to advance our understanding of the impacts of changing ocean conditions on fisheries ecology in the region. It will be held April 4-5 at Rutgers. Participation in the workshop will be drawn from expertise within MARACOOS and MARCO as well as strategic invitations to federal and industry partners currently engaged in activities linking ecology with living resource management. The goals of the workshop are to:

Identify regional data sources and assets within MARACOOS and MARCO relevant to ecological observation and modeling.
Identify gaps that need to be filled in order to more efficiently develop comprehensive tools that support ecologically informed management.
Inventory existing efforts in the state, Mid-Atlantic Region, federal and private sectors that explore how changing ocean conditions (physical oceanography) may reflect ecosystem shifts that are impacting fisheries and living marine resource of cross-regional importance.
Develop an initial strategy to improve communication among these efforts so that planning tools better characterize the structure of the ocean to help drive better policy, and fish community level analysis (both hind- and forecasting).

We want to ensure that we get input from both the limited number of people who can attend the workshop in person and the larger community with expertise on these important issues. In that spirit, we request information from you to specifically address the 4 workshop goals described above. We will use this input to build an initial inventory of data, assets, and effort (Questions 1 and 2 below) and opportunities and strategy to more effectively apply these inventories (Questions 3 and 4 below). Specifically:

Provide a list of regional data sources and assets relevant to ecological observation and modeling
Provide a list of efforts in the state, Mid-Atlantic Region, federal and private sectors that explore how changing ocean conditions that may reflect ecosystem shifts.
Provide a list of gaps that need to be filled in order to more efficiently develop comprehensive tools that support ecologically informed management.
Suggest strategies to improve communication among these efforts so that planning tools better characterize the structure of the ocean to help drive better policy, and fish community level analysis (both hind- and forecasting).

Please send a bulleted list in response to each of the above 4 questions to:

Josh Kohut (Kohut@marine.rutgers.edu) with a cc to Peter Moore (moore@maracoos.org) with ‘RFI: Changing Ocean Conditions RFI’.

Please include your name, affiliation, email and phone number in your response.

We will integrate your response with others before the workshop. This initial list will be presented and discussed.

Your participation will ensure that we get the community input needed and that the final response following the workshop will be more complete. Following the workshop, A final report will be drafted for your review that summarizes the community response (both in person and through this survey, to the above questions.

We would like to thank you for your time and response to this survey request.

Workshop Steering Team Members