[CINAR_PIs] Draft

[Pete Jumars]

Don et al.,

Here is a very rough draft of the letter we discussed this morning:

Dear Senator or Representative of Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts  
or Maine:

As you know, Institution X in your state, together with W, X, Y and Z,  
has successfully competed to become a member of a new NOAA cooperative  
institute, a Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region  
(CINAR).  CINAR brings together an immense array of talent in areas of  
science needed to assist NOAA in its mandate to manage fisheries under  
the pressures of human use and climate change.  It targets a region of  
the East Coast whose marine populations are connected by southward- 
flowing coastal currents and promises solutions to thorny fisheries  
management problems through explicit spatial planning and  
understanding of climate change in the coastal ocean.  This spatial  
planning becomes all the more important as additional uses of the  
ocean are anticipated, i.e., to generate energy from offshore wind.

CINAR joins the Northern Gulf of Mexico Cooperative Institute as  
NOAA’s second regional institute in a trend of consolidation from many  
individual-institution cooperative institutes to a few regional  
cooperative institutes.  It is the logical path to ecosystem-based  
management of marine communities and is fully compatible with the  
parallel move to regional ocean observing networks <http://www.usnfra.org/ 
 >, e.g., the evolution from GoMOOS to NERACOOS and MACOORA to cover  
the CINAR region.

What undercuts this otherwise good news, however, is the lack of funds  
in the NOAA budget to allocate to our new cooperative institute.  We  
encourage you to support increases in appropriations, well justified  
by both oceans commissions, to the lines that support cooperative  
institutes at NOAA, allowing us to help them in their urgent goals of  
better managing fisheries resources and the coastal oceans.


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Pete Jumars <http://www.umaine.edu/marine/people/sites/pjumars/>
For administrative purposes:
Director, School of Marine Sciences
360 Aubert Hall, University of Maine,
Orono, ME 04469-5706
Voice: (207) 581-4381; Fax: (207) 581-4388
For research purposes:
Professor of Marine Sciences,
Darling Marine Center
University of Maine
193 Clark's Cove Road
Walpole, ME 04573-3307
Voice: (207) 563-3146 x.242; Fax: (207) 563-3119
Fastest communication:
e-Mail: jumars at maine.edu
Cell: (207) 592-0717

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