Implementation--General Introduction

Two levels of plan are developed here. The first is scaled to the very modest funds believed to be committed (as intimated by program managers at NSF and NOAA) to U.S. GLOBEC's participation in Arabian Sea studies. We chose a working number of $1.5M, sufficient to support participation by only three, possibly four, principal investigators over a three year period. The second is a more ambitious program designed to answer some of the exciting questions presented by the pelagic ecology of the Arabian Sea. It proposes deployment of a vessel equipped for modern study of fish stocks, together with supporting studies of zooplankton populations. The plans for at least the fish stocks are couched in terms of hypotheses about processes in the region. Given the level of available information about zooplankton, plans must be developed around more general hypotheses (See Appendices). Both the limited and full plans seek dynamical understanding of population processes for both fish and zooplankton that will lead to evaluation of the impact of global climatic change on the Arabian Sea ecosystem.