A workshop on estuarine synthesis, sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) and funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Research Council, was held February 23-25, 1995 at the Beckman Center in Irvine, California. Cosponsored by the Land-Margin Ecosystem Research (LMER) Program and the Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) initiative, the workshop was designed to set the course for achieving an understanding of estuarine processes and estuarine ecology sufficient to predict the responses of coastal systems to a variety of human impacts, including climate change. While the workshop focused on the coastal areas in the United States, the models and other types of synthesis developed will be applicable to estuaries worldwide. As a U.S. SCOPE project, the meeting provided a prototype for a future series of regional meetings that will identifier the specific needs for data, methods and models for estuaries in other areas of the world.
The workshop, organized by John Hobbie of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, and Joanna Burger, Rutgers University, was attended by 37 scientists from around the country. Others on the steering committee were Walter Boynton and Robert Costanza (University of Maryland), Anne Giblin (MBL), James Morris (University of South Carolina) and David Jay and Jeffrey Richey (University of Washington.)
Working groups addressed the following issues:
- Linking biogeochemical processes to higher trophic levels in estuaries
- Physical phenomena and their relationship to ecosystems structure and function
- Predictions of effects of atmospheric input modifications and land use on watershed hydrology and material fluxes to coastal ecosystems
- Effects of habitat change on estuarine food web dynamics and pruction processes
- Using scientific insights and information to manage coastal ecosystems more effectively
Present plans are to publish the results of the workshop as a book, incorporating two products of the meeting: the formal plenary papers, illustrating various synthesis approaches and summarizing the scientific knowledge available about the specific topic, and the design of a 10-year plan for estuarine synthesis produced by each of five discussion groups which identifies the methods, data and models required.