Introduction

The objective of the U.S. GLOBEC program is to understand how changes in the global environment, especially climate, affect the abundances, variation of abundance, and production of animals in the sea. Modeling is one of the approaches identified as a means of realizing this objective. In particular, the U.S. GLOBEC initial science plan states that this understanding "...must necessarily involve coupled physical-biological models, linking performance of individual organisms to local and mesoscale physical processes and linking both the biology and local and regional physics to basin scale changes in global climate." Thus, from its inception, the U.S. GLOBEC program has emphasized and supported modeling studies. The U.S. GLOBEC Long Range Science Plan recently stated, "A long-term goal of U.S. GLOBEC is to bring predictive models for a limited set of ecosystem properties to an operational stage in the next decade."

To further its modeling goals, U.S. GLOBEC supported a workshop at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah, Georgia on 23-25 February 1993. The workshop brought together twenty-one scientists (Appendix C) with expertise in measuring and/or modeling zooplankton population dynamics and secondary production. The workshop provided a forum for the exchange of ideas between empiricists and modelers.

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