Program Update: National Oceanographic Partnership Program – July 2012
The NOPP Office is excited to announce that the Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 NOPP Report to Congress has been released and is now available on the NOPP website. Highlights of the report include NOPP’s largest partnership in the history of the program with the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Office, in which 13 awards were made. Several projects were funded under the Marine Mammal Detection and Classification partnership between the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). NOPP’s potential involvements in the National Ocean Policy, as well as its interagency activities, are also discussed within the report.
The NOPP-funded project, Lophelia II: Deepwater Coral Platforms, completed its final cruise in a four-year research mission to explore the deepwater coral communities and shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. The project was funded through NOPP by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). For more information on the project and its final cruise visit, click here.
NOPP-funded PI’s Dr. Len Thomas and Dr. Tiago Marques from the University of St. Andrews published an article titled “Passive Acoustic Monitoring for Estimating Animal Density” in an upcoming issue of Acoustics Today. The article is the 16th article to come out of their 2007 NOPP-funded research. The upcoming publication focused on estimating the density of cetaceans using passive acoustic fixed sensors. A PDF of the article can be found here.
The Biodiversity Ad Hoc Group met in July and heard an update on Smithsonian Institutions’ new Marine Global Earth Observatory (GEO) program. The program is being set up as a global-scale, long-term program focused on marine biodiversity. A formal launch of the program is anticipated for fall 2012, with the program officially beginning in 2013. To learn more about MarineGEO, please click here. The group also heard an update from a workshop that was hosted by NOAA in 2011 focused on the challenge of improving NOAA’s holistic understanding and management of ocean ecosystems by enhancing knowledge of the microbial components of the marine ecosystem. A workshop report is expected later this year.
The Interagency Working Group on Facilities and Infrastructure’s (IWG-FI) Federal Oceanographic Fleet Working Group (FOFWG) and Fleet Schedule Portal Working Group (FSPWG) held a joint meeting at Ocean Leadership on July 11. Both groups prepared briefs and presented to the Subcommittee on Ocean Science Technology (SOST), the parent body of the IWG-FI, on July 18 on their progress. The Subcommittee on Unmanned Systems (SUS) writing team also briefed the SOST on their progress at the July 18 meeting. The SUS co-chairs will meet again on August 13, and the full group will meet on September 12. The FOFWG and FSPWG plan to meet again at the end of August. The IWG-FI will hold their next meeting at Ocean Leadership in mid-September.
The Ocean Research Advisory Panel (ORAP) will hold their next meeting at Ocean Leadership on August 15-16, 2012. ORAP meetings are open to the public and the agenda has been posted on the ORAP Meeting webpage. Briefing topics include ocean observations, ocean education and implementing ecosystem-based management.
