January 22, 2001

Highlights

• Phoebe Y. Zhang and Fred Grassle have been informed by NSF that their proposal "A Web-interfaced Dynamic Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS)" will be funded for two years starting from March 1, 2001. The system is expected to help researchers identify relationships between groupings of species and their environment, and to enable marine scientists to design more effective sampling programs, such as those used for the Census of Marine Life. Their collaborators include Rick Lathrop and Dan Wartenberg of Rutgers University, and David Stockwell and Karen Stocks of The San Diego Supercomputer Center/UCSD.
• Joe Grzymski from afar, "I'm at McMurdo Station Antarctica, TAing the 2001 Antarctic Biology Course. I'm helping the participants in the course learn about phytoplankton and microbial diversity in some of the incredible environments of Antarctica. It has been cold and windy this year so along with a little less swimming I'm also working on cloning anti freeze glycoproteins so people can be more like antarctic fish. I'll be home in an equally cold office on the third floor in mid-February."

Meetings Attended

• Hernan Arango presented a talk at the AMS-81 annual meeting in Albuquerque, entitled: "Advanced Data Assimilation Strategies in Modern Observational Networks For Real-Time, High Resolution Applications.
• Peter Rona and post-doc Karen Bemis participated in the NSF Endeavour Ridge Observatory Data Management workshop at the University of Washington on January 9th. They then met on January 10th with collaborators at the Applied Physics Lab/UW to plan the next stage of their seafloor observatory work which is for long-term acoustic monitoring of seafloor hydrothermal flow regimes (black smokers and diffuse flow) on scales from individual vents to vent fields.