Acronyms

Access

Logo

Contact

PROJECT #2003-15
Travel Support for Asian Marine Scientists to Attend the Final JGOFS Open Science Conference

With the APN grant we were able to partially fund 6 scientists to participate in the conference, one from Bangladesh, two from India, one from P. R. China, one from the Republic of Korea, and one from Pakistan. Participants from the other APN countries listed above were self-funded.

Brief introduction and background:
In 1987 under the auspices of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) became the first Core Project of the International Geosphere‑Biosphere Programme (IGBP). Global in scope and both multinational and interdisciplinary, JGOFS adopted two major goals to:

• Understand the processes controlling the cycling of carbon and other biogenic elements in the ocean and their exchange with the atmosphere and the seafloor; and
• Advance our capacity to predict the response of ocean systems to anthropogenic perturbations.

JGOFS has sponsored a series of symposia designed to measure the advance of scientific knowledge against the questions the study was designed to address. The final open science conference, "A Sea of Change: JGOFS Accomplishments and the Future of Ocean Biogeochemistry," was held from 5-8 May, 2003, at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences facility in Washington D.C., the site of the first international JGOFS meeting in 1990.

Outline of activities conducted:
The conference with its thirty-four (34) plenary talks focused not only on JGOFS highlights bringing together all the various scientific accomplishments of the various national and international JGOFS studies, time series efforts and model results, but our schedule also included talks on the connections between JGOFS and other science programs, as well as a look forward to new programs in ocean sciences. Poster sessions in the afternoon allowed participants the opportunity to see the latest JGOFS synthesis efforts and individual contributions arranged across regional and cross-cutting scientific themes in 196 posters. The talks and posters summarized the fundamental results of more than 15 years of JGOFS-related science. U.S. and international data management efforts were showcased during the week and conference delegates all received CDROMS and DVDs of current JGOFS data compilations.

Three-hundred and thirty-two (332) conference delegates participated, representing thirty-two (32) countries having backgrounds ranging from past and present JGOFS “heroes” to the seventy-one (71) young students who represented the next generation who will carry on this work in future programs. This included a successful parallel program specific to minority students: Twenty-one (21) students were matched up with twenty-one (21) mentor/scientists participating in the conference.

Outcomes and products:
The main product of the conference, all of the plenary talks and many of the posters are now on line via the U.S. JGOFS website <http://www.uib.no/jgofs/jgofs.html>, where they will serve for a long time to come as a community resource, and ultimately reach the widest possible audience and have the largest impact.

To view and download the talks in original PowerPoint and PDF formats and posters in PDF format, see our revised conference website: <http://usjgofs.whoi.edu/osc2003.html>

Future directions and follow-up work:
JGOFS contributions and directions for future research emerged from presentations at the conference. IGBP and SCOR have backed a strong bottom-up effort by the international scientific community for the continued development of a new project, Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystems, as part of the next phase of IGBP. This project will have strong collaborative links with ongoing IGBP Core Projects such as SOLAS (Surface Ocean Layer and Atmospheric Study), LOICZ (Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone) and GLOBEC (Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics), and will build on the results of JGOFS and other global change research.