2. What are the major opportunities open to biological oceanography in the next two decades andwhat challenges need to be overcome to realize those opportunities?
I would like to follow up on a point made by Alice Alldredge in her posting. She writes "The next two decades will bring the biggest changes to coastal ecosystems, both benthic and pelagic". This sentence clicked with the impression I was left with after reading the white papers. After perusing the white papers I was struck with the highly compartmentalized manner in which the material was presented. While some exciting new research was described I still had the feeling that we were thinking about the oceans in the same we always have; the "benthic" and "pelagic" camps were particularly evident.
At the risk of sounding self-serving, I would like to suggest that biological oceanographers/marine ecologists need to think more holistically particularly when dealing with the coastal zone. Oceanographers who study plankton dynamics in the open ocean can probably "get away" with just studying water column processes which may include everything from nutrient cycling to predation. This is not the case in the coastal zone where there is ample evidence to show that the life cycles of many important species incorporate both pelagic and benthic phases, and where the cycling of organic matter and nutrients between the the water column and benthos is important. Future studies of the coastal zone must embrace a more holistic approach.
Is this statement too obvious to require mention or is it truly missing from our thinking?
Dr. Nancy Marcus
Department of Oceanography
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306
Tel: 850 644-5498
FAX: 850 644-2581
email: marcus@ocean.fsu.edu
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