Professor Charles H Greene

The interests of our research group range from the ecological dynamics of marine populations to the effects of global climate change on marine ecosystems. While much of this research is observationally oriented, we also scale up our results through collaborative modeling, remote-sensing, and synthesis projects with scientists from other institutions. Over the past 15 years, much of our research has been associated with the US GLOBal ocean ECosystems (GLOBEC) Northwest Atlantic/Georges Bank Program. This research has led us to an expanded global perspective, one which recognizes that distant processes as far away as Arctic are impacting shelf ecosystems throughout the North Atlantic. With the US GLOBEC Program currently in its synthesis phase, our laboratory group is developing a variety of models to interpret our own field data from the 1990's as well as other physical and biological data sets extending back to the 1950's. Retrospective analyses of these longer time-series data have enabled us to explain our own field observations within the context of interdecadal-scale climate variability. They have also led our research in new directions, such as the conservation oceanography of the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale. Since our research in the Northwest Atlantic has entered a phase requiring less time at sea, we have initiated new field projects that will create many new and exciting opportunities for studying the ecological dynamics of pelagic animal populations. With colleagues from a number of institutions on the mainland and Hawaii, we have been involved in the development of undersea listening arrays in the Pacific Northwest and the Hawaiian Archipelago. It is intended that these listening arrays will be used to track acoustically tagged and/or vocalizing pelagic animals over relatively large geographic expanses of the ocean. In the Pacific Northwest, we have collaborated with the Census of Marine Life's Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) Project, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. POST has funding from the Sloan and Moore Foundations to deploy acoustic line arrays across the continental shelf at numerous locations along the West Coast spanning from California to the Aleutians. The initial focus of POST has been on tracking juvenile salmon migrations and estimating their survivorship during critical stages of their life history. Additional species will be added as the full POST array is completed by 2010. Last year, the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN), a global expansion of the POST concept, was funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. I have been invited to lead an international training program for OTN. The foundation for this OTN training program will be the series of summer Marine Bioacoustics courses that I have been coordinating at Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL) during alternate, odd-numbered years since 2003. Funding for this series of advanced, graduate-level courses has been provided by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and both ONR and OTN have committed to continue support for an expanded program through 2012.