Scientific Goal and Objectives

The overarching goal of U.S. GLOBEC is to understand ecosystem dynamical processes in order to be able to predict the response of the ocean ecosystem and the stability of the marine food web to climate change. It embraces the following more specific objectives:

To determine physical influences and biophysical interactions in planktonic communities;
To understand the dynamics of zooplankton (i.e., holoplankton, meroplankton, and ichthyoplankton) and their interactions with both lower and higher trophic levels; and,
To identify probable changes in living marine resources resulting from climate change.

To achieve these objectives U.S. GLOBEC will:

assess basic system characteristics
benchmark populations and their environments including their natural variabilities
measure biological and physical processes and rates
characterize ecosystem sensitivity to climate forcing at regional to planetary scales
determine critical global change variables
design an operational ecosystem monitoring system which couples observations and modeling.

See Table 1 for details.

U.S. GLOBEC has identified several ocean ecosystem types for emphasis. To date these include: banks, shelves and shallow seas; eastern boundary currents; the Southern Ocean; and, critical regions of the open ocean. The detailed scientific objectives for these systems are presented in the next section.