Successful MAR-ECO synthesis meeting

The first MAR-ECO Synthesis meeting was held 27 May- 5 June 2008. Hosted by Gaby Gorsky and Marc Picheral of the Laboratoire d'Océanologie, Station Zoologique, the MAR-ECO synthesis team recently met in the old and beautiful town of Villefranche-sur-Mer. A first departure from having meetings along Atlantic shorelines, this meeting marked the initiation of a new phase in MAR-ECO; the synthesising of achievements in preparation for the 2010 end of the Census of Marine Life.

Left to right, back row: Ingvar Byrkjedal, Astthor Gislason, Monty Priede, Mike Vecchione, Mikko Heino
Second row : Tone Falkenhaug, Aage Hoines, Olav Rune Godoe, Andrey Gebruk, Thomas de Lange Wenneck, Uwe Piatkowski
First row : Henrik Skov, Odd Aksel Bergstad, Tracey Sutton, Gui Menesez, Henrik Soiland

The 17 members of the synthesis team reviewed results and had three items on the agenda:

1.       Drafting of a MAR-ECO chapter for a CoML book to be issued in 2010.
2.       Discuss, outline and possibly draft a MAR-ECO overview article.
3.       Discuss and decide on contributions to SYNDEEP and other cross-project activities planned by CoML.
4.       Discuss visualization efforts to be conducted and completed in 2009.

Most of the work was concentrated on Item 1 and this resulted in a first complete draft of the book chapter. The overview article is in the pipeline, but it was decided to postpone further work until more results are available from ongoing MAR-ECO components such as ECOMAR, DEECON and the NSF project led by Tracey Sutton. There are also other ongoing analyses of 2003-2005 data that should be included in such an overview article.

SYNDEEP is a cross-project collaboration between the deepwater field project of CoML and FMAP. These will meet in the autumn of 2008 and Monty Priede, Mike Vecchione, Tone Falkenhaug and Odd Aksel Bergstad will represent MAR-ECO. Contact persons for other cross-project activities were also appointed.

The visulaization team comprising Thomas de Lange Wenneck and Aage Hoines produced a solution and preliminary design for a geo-referenced presentation of selected visual results and highlights from MAR-ECO. The product will be accessed through Google Earth. Thomas and Aage will attend the CoML mapping and visualization workshop in the US in October 2008.