15 November 1997

Dear Colleague:

We are pleased to announce the beginnings of a project sponsored by the Biological Oceanography Program at the National Science Foundation. It is an assessment of our field and an attempt to provide a vision of what it could become over the next few decades. This process comprises a celebration of recent advances and deliberate planning of directions and infrastructure for the future. This future is yours, so we ask for your help in defining it.

An overall assessment of this type has never happened before in the Biological Oceanography Program. This new effort is not an attempt to define specific new programs to follow JGOFS or GLOBEC; rather, it is an effort to overview our field and assess broad intellectual, infrastructural or training needs that limit future advancement. Recommendations from this overview are not intended to favor either "big" or "little" science, but to identify our most promising opportunities and most pressing needs. Biological oceanography and marine ecology are fortunate in this context to be able to draw on preceding and parallel efforts in the other oceanography programs. Visit http://www.joi-odp.org/FUMAGES/FUMAGES.html to see the product of the review in Marine Geology and Geophysics, which acted as the guinea pig. Physical Oceanography at http://www.joss.ucar.edu/joss_psg/project/oce_workshop/apropos/ already has obtained substantial community input and plans its workshop for December. Chemical Oceanography at http://www.joss.ucar.edu/joss_psg/project/oce_workshop/focus/ has begun efforts for a workshop in early January. We encourage you to visit these web sites to get a flavor of the process, not least because ecology by definition includes these abiotic aspects of the environment.

We plan several milestones beginning with the posting of white papers on about 15 January and culminating in an intense workshop of about 40 people from 1-6 March. A score of community representatives have been asked to write white papers treating particular subsets of our field. Their summaries of exciting accomplishments and new directions will appear at http://www.joss.ucar.edu/joss_psg/project/oce_workshop/oeuvre/ on about 15 January. Feedback will be posted at the web site as it arrives. The papers are very much working documents intended to stimulate individual thought and community discussion, and the timing is apt. We hope to hear the issues being widely discussed at Ocean Sciences in San Diego. At any point, but particularly after the white-paper posting, we invite comment to one of us or to one of the other workshop participants, who are identified on the web site. Feel free to reach us through that web site or by letter. Please do make your opinions about exciting accomplishments and promising directions known, especially if you do not find them well represented in the ongoing exchanges. All the inputs will be funneled into the workshop, whose purpose is to digest the white papers and community reactions and render a coherent document about our status and future. We thank you in advance for your help.

Sincerely yours,

Peter A. Jumars, Co-Chair of OEUVRE	Mark E. Hay, Co-Chair of OEUVRE
School of Oceanography	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Campus Box 357940	Institute of Marine Sciences
University of Washington	3431 Arendell St.
Seattle, WA 98195-7940	Morehead City, NC 28557

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