 They're on and so we'll just go in in order that they're listed in the agenda, which is Russ first Catherine Mark and Merrill. Unless someone wants to change it around I. Is there any. Any objection to go in that order or. I have no objection. I noticed that Kathy sent an email suggesting that I precede her. Okay, a bit of a surprise to me. I'm indifferent, however you wish to arrange it. Okay, well, well, if that, if that works for you, yeah, that's fine with me. Just, we'll just do it that way then Mark so you'll go second Kathy will go third. Okay, okay, so, so we have. So we have Russ, Russ Hopcroft, Catherine Barbeau, Mark Oman, and Merrill Albur on on this zoom session and they're going to talk about their respective LTER programs and so we thought we would you know really just give you a few minutes say five minutes to introduce your project or your, your program and then that would leave a lot of time for questions and we usually find their questions the panel wants to clarify so that's the, that's the drill and I'll watch the time and I'll give you a warning with about 15 seconds to go. So we'll start with, with Russ so Russ go ahead and get started just going to talk about northern Gulf of Alaska. Yeah. Okay, can you see my screen share. Yes. All right, good. This is always a challenge. I have multiple screens and it doesn't always get the right. I'm going to be talking about the scenic north Gulf of Alaska and I'm representing our team of investigators. So the NGA site is a sub in the sub Arctic Pacific it's kind of bounded by the big red box you see. It's a highly seasonal environment. It has complex but symmetry and circulation. And we have been doing cruises at least twice a year for the last 25 years, along a cross health transect that goes through the middle of that box from the coast, all the way into the deep high nutrient local water. We've been using a smaller vessel much of that time and since we became an LTR we have access to the school yak, which allows a much greater range of science. We have large inner annual variation in the system in the spring. We have years that have been unusually cold and with things like heat waves and El Nino's years that have been unusually warm. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the communities respond to this variability. I'm going to talk about a lot of science. I'm going to try and just take a couple of highlights. As you may or may not know, there's a difference in the way the phytoplankton is in ecosystems based on the seasonal timing and characteristic of the NGA. We alternate between this large cell phytoplankton community during spring and a small cell community that dominates the summer and fall. When we get unusually cold or unusually warm years, we kind of tip the normal seasonal cycle. So for example, during the heat wave we had in 2019, we definitely didn't see our spring community. We saw a summer community most of the season, which has implications for the transfer to higher trophic levels. Mix of trophy, the ability for organisms to act as both consumers and primary producers is surprisingly common in the Gulf of Alaska. There's a suggestion that it might be even more prevalent during events such as heat waves, although the data is still kind of inconclusive on that based on confidence intervals. And when we do have years with less nutrients in the system such as heat waves, you can actually see that the degree of mix of trophy is an attempt to compensate for reduction in the normal flow of nutrients through the system. An important part of what happens then is that mix of trophy helps compensate for some of the normal change from a large cell to a small cell community by creating larger packets during the time of the year when we wouldn't have phytoplankton available to supply the metazoline zooplankton with large particles that they prefer to graze on. In terms of the variability in our zooplankton communities, despite great variability in the spring phytoplankton blooms, zooplankton biomass to me is surprisingly consistent across years. There's only about a four-fold range in the biomass that we see for the spring bloom and about a two-fold range of what we see in the summer. And this suggests that even though at the species level the changes can be pronounced, the system is surprisingly stable and we think it's functional redundancy, complementary behavior that stabilizes the resources in this system to higher trophic levels. We, with 25 years of data, we're now able to show that there's some pretty strong linkages to climate indices and these climate indices drive or reflect the environmental variability in this system. For example, we can show that both in the spring and in the summer, the PDO and secondarily El Nino Southern Oscillation can be a big driver of the changes we see in the zooplankton communities. In fact, they can explain up to about two-thirds of the variability that we see in zooplankton biomass. Now to the questions that were specifically asked, the challenges with observation programs that I presume these are going to be common across some of the other sites. Complex ecosystems require large multidisciplinary teams with a large associated labor costs to study them. And NSF would argue with large ship costs to support those efforts. There's this trade-off between funding staff to maintain long-term data quality and consistency, particularly for things that involve species level identification and funding students to provide that training and education aspect that could be inconsistent in terms of the quality over time. There's mission creep. We constantly are talking about things we'd really love to do that we try to do that we don't have funding for. Some of that is driven internally and some of it is driven by things like the review process or the trying to collaborate better across sites, make things more equivalent. Okay, if you could wrap it up, Rush. Oh, I didn't realize you've done that. Yeah, it goes fast. Consistency of infrastructure, shifting expectations from students of early career scientists. Challenges with data sharing, instrument-based. Oh, I'm already at six, sorry. Instrument-based measurements, data generated can require a considerable amount of time. And I think that maybe it's just faster if I just click through these. Yeah, maybe get the conclusions up there. Future needs. I'm sorry, every first this and I must have just embellished too much. So, I think that was the last slide. Okay, well, thanks. And we'll hold the questions until everyone talks. One more, one more. Okay, there we go. Sorry. Okay. All right, well, thanks. Russ and we'll hold questions and we'll try to get them all at the right at the end. So the next speaker is Mark. So, I just wanted to make sure that you still would prefer that I proceed you. I will defer to your wishes. John McGowan would have been proud. Please. Okay, next we have Catherine. Catherine Barbo. Okay, thank you. Can you. You can see it. Yeah. Okay, good. So, like Mark, I'm from the California current ecosystem. LTR. We are a Eastern boundary, upwelling region. So this is one of the, an example of one of the most productive regions of the world ocean, strongly seasonally driven by circulation patterns that cause upwelling of cold nutrient rich waters off of point conception in California. Supporting phytoplankton blooms and associated rich productivity at higher trophic levels. And CCLTR has been running since 2004. And this site is also the site of the much longer California cooperative oceanic fisheries investigations time series, which we are very fortunate to be able to collaborate with. So, like Mark, I just have three main points that I want to make in my presentation. One is that ocean LTRs, by their nature is ecologically focused time series ocean, ocean time series provide a unique opportunity to understand feedbacks between changing ecosystems, biogeochemistry and the marine carbon cycle. This is from a recent publication, Nature Communications, Stuckel et al from CCLTR, showing our ability to create one of the most detailed budgets of the biological carbon pump in the world ocean. Using our series of process cruises from 2004, Stuckel and collaborators were able to actually budget out different components of the biological carbon pump in our region, the sinking particle flux, the active transport flux related to grazers and fish, and also the physical flux that moves particles out by circulation forces. And within this regime, we're also able to conduct really sophisticated experimental manipulative studies. This is another recent publication from our CCLTR group where we studied the response of phytoplankton to ocean acidification and iron limitation using shipboard incubations during our process cruises. And so in CCLTR, this is kind of the dream scenario where we can incorporate really sophisticated biogeochemical studies with the ability to connect that to flux. I'm a person who's had a lot of experience with the geotracist program, and now the biogeoscapes discussions. I think that in CCLTR, we're already doing what a lot of ocean science is aiming for because of the unique nature of the LTR ocean time series. Another point I want to make relates to something that Russ brought up also, which is our needs for the difficulty of serving and sharing and intercomparing the flood of new data from new technologies. This is from that Lampedal paper, transcriptomic and proteomic data, also metabolomics data from the Iluahari group at our site, very complex. Another type of data that we're increasingly seeing from all the ocean LTR sites is imagery of plankton, both in situ and ex situ and how to use AI technologies to analyze this data, how to train both people and systems to interpret this data and how to compare this data across sites and how to store it so that it can be publicly available. And finally, I want to make a point about the importance of interagency partnerships for maintaining time series like ours. This is our station plan. The individual points that you see are the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation Station plan. This is unique in the United States. It's 70 plus years old at this point, and it's largely supported by NOAA. And we augment that time series. But our partnership with Calcoffee and NOAA is crucial for CCLTR and other observational capabilities that we have here, the CCE Moorings, CCE1 and CCE2 off point conception are also partially supported by NOAA, these glider lines that we see extending out from the shore. This is the California Underwater Glider Network, also largely run with NOAA support. And so it's really important that's the point I want to make to preserve these types of interagency partnerships to enable the kind of end to end observing system that we created in the California current ecosystem. Thank you. That's all the points I had to make. Yeah. Thank you, Kathy. And next is Merrill. Talking about Georgia. And we can see your screen. Okay. And I unmute, but we're good now. Okay. Hold on. I just have to get it. Okay. Are you seeing the right view? I think so. It looks good. There we go. All right. Thanks very much. So I'm going to bring you to the coast. Here's a map of all the LTRs and we're on the coast of Georgia. And our overall goal is to understand how estuaries and intertidal wetland ecosystems to understand them and then how they respond to long term change. We've been on the ground since 2000 and we have a fairly large program. I wanted to sort of show this inset first, which shows that there's actually a series of longitudinal gradient in coastal sites along the east coast. It's provided a lot of opportunity for leveraged and cross site information and we like to take advantage of that. So just to kind of get you familiar with our site, we are on the coast of Georgia. This is the watershed of the Altma Har River that's bringing a lot of fresh water. So we have to think about what's happening from the land side as well as the ocean side. If we kind of traverse around this domain, most of the intertidal area is salt marsh dominated by Spartana. But as we go up the Altamaha estuary, it gets progressively fresher and we have different kinds of habitat. I also wanted to point out Saplow Island is in the middle of all this and the Marine Institute on Saplow is the base of operations for the program. We have three different main time series that I just want to just flash up. First is thinking outside of our domain and we're taking advantage and leveraging some NOAA data and others for our models and for the sort of getting the hydrographic context for this system. Within the actual domain we've got CTDs set up. We go on mini cruises and are grabbing information about the estuary and the water. Our primary focus really those on the intertidal areas and we're primarily thinking about things like this is sediment elevation in the marsh and understanding how that changes over time. And we've had lots of papers that use this data. But I also wanted to talk about some additional time series that are a little more focused. We've got a flux tower that's measuring at 15 Hertz. We're looking at CO2 exchange with the atmosphere. We have two different cameras, phenocams that are focused and we can think about they take pictures every 30 minutes. We could think about marsh binology. We can think about flying. And then we've actually started a regime of monthly drone flights at two sites. And I think to get back to some of the other points. It takes an awful lot to maintain these time series and I would like to talk about that there's a lot of infrastructure and tech time that goes into all of this. And then of course we do lots of other things. So I wanted to just highlight briefly to two things. One is that because we're in a coastal system, we can do experiments. This was a long term experiment to look at saltwater being added to a freshwater marsh, which mimics what would happen with seawater intrusion. And we follow the effects through lots of different aspects of the system. This was led by Chris Kraft. So that's one kind of thing that we can do within an LTR. The other thing this is work that's been led by my colleague Jessica O'Connell and she has developed a statistical model to be able to predict below ground ecosystem resilience thinking about below ground biomass. And it takes advantage again of a lot of the infrastructure and the time series measurements that we have. And then when you put it together, we can get pictures like this that really give you good information about spatial and temporal patterns and we can scale up to satellites. So we're very excited and she has a student working to expand this. The last thing I want to talk about, which maybe wasn't quite in the scope, but I really need to share this is the sea level trends. So I think it's no surprise to the people in this room that we're seeing long term increases, but that the rate of sea level has the rate of rise of sea level has increased since the GCE has been in place. The slope has doubled compared to the long term rate. This is at Fort Pulaski. It's also probably not surprising that the high water levels are increasing along with that and we're seeing a lot more flooding up in the high area beyond the intertidal. But the point that I want to make is that there's also the lunar nodal cycle, which has an 18.6 year period. So the sea level rise rate is happening and meanwhile, and that's thermal expansion and glacier melting, but we have this lunar nodal cycle and they're additive. So then we put it together. We can look at a trace that looks like this where the net change in high water decreases when the lunar nodal cycle is down. And then gets added when it's up. And if we go back to the data that I showed you for GCE for the for the Fort Pulaski. Since GCE is in place, we've been in a down and up and a down mode and we're about to increase another nine year up phase. And so we're poised in this long term series to look at this and I, I feel like people maybe don't realize this is this is global. This is a paper by Thompson that did this calculation and thought about the amplitudes and the threshold times for lots of different tide gauges around the country. So that's all. Thank you. Okay, thank you. And I think if you raise your hands on on zoom, then I can I'll call on people to ask questions. And Kelly, keep an eye on on the hands as well, because if I miss somebody, let me know. Okay, Mona, go ahead. I think I do came first. Oh, all right. See, I didn't see that for some reason. Go ahead. This is picking up on Russ's point, but it's a question to all of the people who presented today. In terms of training students. Can you say anything at all about the number of PhD students versus master students and who's fitting into that trained population that you're looking for. I don't know if I was articulating that question. I'm happy to repeat, but I think maybe you get the question I'm asking. Yeah, I mean, it's a mix of both. Of course, it's much easier to commit to taking a master's student than a PhD student, PhD students to provide better continuity and and tend to produce more consistent data for a larger period of time. My point was really we have to balance where the where the money goes given that the money in the programs is fixed. And there's almost two competing needs of maintaining data quality and the training. I guess I'm trying to find out if the people that you need, you said the people whom you need to maintain that long term quality. The trained people that you need other PhD PhD holders or are they masters holders. Oh, most of the staff are masters holders. If that's what the question is asking. Right, because I'm trying to get it seeing if there's a match or a mismatch between whom we are training and whom we need. With respect to CC and the Kathy, you may have the most current numbers of people we've trained, but I think, first of all, we are we have disproportionately PhD students involved in the program though a few master students, but a very important point from my perspective is it's not just the people who matriculate and scripts the students who matriculate at SIO where CC is based. But we view that our, our LTR site is a nucleus of research that tries to create opportunities for many other people, for many for scientists and other institutions either other parts of the world. And in that certainly includes students. So if I remember correctly, I think in our phase three, we had of 66 graduate students who were who directly were directly involved in CC work, not all of them receive financial support from NSF, the CCB, but they all received either field opportunities research, research data, or direct interaction and the basis for not model validation. So I think this, this nucleus concept is a critical one for why the investment in LTR seems to me to be really well well allocated. So I see Steven somehow jumped up there and pop above Mona so go ahead Steven and then we'll go with Mona. No, no, Mona was first I don't know what zoom is doing. All right, okay, Mona go. All right, thank you. Well, I'll try and be quick. My, my question is two parts so I've had the opportunity to work closely and learn from Merrill, and I feel that RGC program here is fantastic. I'm also located in a in a community cultural Saplow Island. That's where you gimme is based and the I've had a chance to witness how LTR programs engage with the communities in which they're located. So my, my question is, first of all, is there engagement of social scientists in LTR and and do you see that be a need as you as you do your work. The second question is LTR probably has been I don't know the history of LTR but I believe it's been in an existence since 1980. Have you seen the mission of LTRs evolve over over time Merrill again reflecting on the work that you've done with respect to sea level rise. I'm just wondering the role that LTR plays in in global environmental change and engaging the community in that work is all my questions clear. So the LTR has actually gone through some cycles over the last few since I've been involved where there have been times when there's been more of an emphasis on social science. There is at one point almost a requirement that each site really think about engaging social scientists that change. I think there wasn't as much support necessarily through the right NSF directorates for that. I think that where it has landed is maybe a good place, which is when it makes sense. So when the questions make sense when it makes sense to engage then absolutely that's important but maybe it's not required for every system and I'll let the other PIs think about or say their experience with that. In our system we have involved social scientists as you know. I forget the other one. The mission of LTR has it has it evolved over time. So I don't think it's a it's really evolved at at the basis at the basic level. There's decadal reviews. We just had another decadal review and I think you know different program officers, different PIs put their spin on it. But I would say that overall it really hasn't fundamentally changed. I think that there's been more or less emphasis maybe on the ecological discovery part of LTR placed on it by different program officers. Anyone else want to jump in from the LTR groups. I was going to say, in response to Merrill's last point that I feel like there is an increasing mandate to address diversity, equity and inclusion issues as not separate. We've always had to do education and outreach but the diversity, equity and inclusion is kind of a separate issue. That's something that we've discussed with the LTR leadership when we have meetings of the lead PIs, you know, there's difficulties depending on where you are even discussing diversity, equity and inclusion in your proposal, for example. I mean, we in California don't have these issues, but we have collaborators who are in Florida, for example, where there's actually. We can't put those kinds of words in the proposals and so this creates difficulty. So that I just wanted to mention the diversity, equity and inclusion aspects. I feel like that's something that we're currently grappling with in different ways across the network. Okay. Stephen. I have a similar kinds of question. Thanks. All of you for those, the summaries of what's been going on. The long term aspect of the projects you're doing you've all emphasized but you've also emphasized kind of how things have changed and that's kind of where I want to ask. The need for long term data and, and there's sometimes a pressure to keep continuing to collect the data the same way you did at the beginning because you want a long term data set but then new techniques come up and new ways of looking at things and so I'm just curious how you're grappling with that we've heard a little bit about some of the transcriptomic data we heard a little bit about, you know, taking plankton toes well, you know, how do you balance the needs for those two very different kinds of data. If, if I may, my lead colleague Paul Smith said about long time series is the time series are long, but as a consequence they're old. And this presents this this restates that your dilemma. And what we've tried to do in CCE is tried to be as forward looking as we can when we, when we power ramp up a new measurement program and make sure it's something that we think is worthy of sustaining to try to look forward as we can, but then there are simply times when methods become obsolete or superseded. So the obvious point is we try to have extensive periods of overlap. And we've recently encountered that with a transitioning from a much more genomic to a much more genomic perspective. And we initially began with HPLC and MP fluorescence microscopy, and we will sustain HPLC measurements for some period of time, until we have some reasonable quantitative way to assess whether or not they're when and where they're comparable and when they're not. But you're going to keep counting thousands the same way. And at this point, I would love to have an EDNA approach that would give me the quantitative data that I would trust and would be comparable. I don't see it right now Steve, I don't know maybe you do. I see it, things may develop in that direction and we wish we will push and and look for these opportunities, but we will not know something as important as that you fall since it's a species specific time series. We will, at this point, we will not compromise that, but we will try to accommodate innovation. Okay, I'll see Rick you were next and then you went away and then you came back so why don't you go ahead. Thanks, I hiccuped there. Also Steve asked most of my questions so I'm just going to ask the second part. First, it's nice to see all you folks again. So, Mark, you provided a real nice answer to Steve's question, and given all the other LTRs. I wonder about the interoperability and the intercom Paris and between the LTRs and for example with someone running the other one up and say, Gulf of Alaska, or, you know, Heidi Sossack running ours at Woods Hall. How would their answers be different within the tolerance of, you know, each LTR of course has its own strengths and particular foci but in the sense of, if someone were to try to be writing a synthesis of long term ecological change in US waters. 50 years from now looking back at all these data sets. How would the people be able to have that interoperable or inter LTR sense of, you know, a synthesis look, and how do you folks all communicate these approach that like Mark takes versus the approach. You know, Gulf of Alaska takes or someone else takes. I have an answer, however. Yeah, I'll go. In fact, we have a synthesis proposal going on right now where we're looking at the data sets from the different LTR sites in a similar way. The bottom line is that we're looking often at the trends insights, and the trends don't require that things are done identically. The trends are going to emerge regardless of the fact that we're measuring things a little bit differently. It would be problematic for each time series to try and standardize on somebody else's methodology because then you've run up into an even bigger problem and then changing whether we're using molecular versus collection based. Yeah, so. Hey, I think Brad is next and then Peter. Thanks for that answer folks. And my question is in the context, thanks everyone in the context of if you wait long enough, your question will appear in some form or another. So, I think I'm asking a different version of the same question and, and it really goes back to thinking about 40 years ago that our perspective when this program began about the interconnectedness of marine ecosystems and the role of climate and climate change in the ocean was very different than it is today. And I just wonder about two things around the structure of the existing program whether we have the right scales for LTR measurements. And then the same question about whether we're getting an integrated perspective. I mentioned the point about looking at linkages along the coastal kind of a wave guide of the Atlantic, but whether we're putting enough effort into that kind of integrative scale. And then that feeds back to the question of whether the LTR structures themselves are set at the appropriate scales, given our present understanding of how these ecosystems interconnect. So that's a set of kind of related questions that I'm not sure who wants to respond to this. Give it to you. Any takers. Well, I'll give it a shot. So you're absolutely right there's different times there's different spatial scales on and I would say it feels like the newer ones and the ocean ones are larger. Right. And so, you know, the Northeast shelf is a very large domain, compared with where we are, we're more coastal, but how we think about it. I would say though that there are, there's regional looks and people do, even if I show you my map, we end up collaborating and thinking about things depending on the question we're asking at sort of all kinds of scales. So it may, the boundaries are a little bit mutable, I would say, I mean, not exactly where our observations are coming from, but our inferences end up going, I mean, we end up kind of thinking about things well outside our own exact geography. Does that make sense. My take is that the whole structure of the US LTR framework is to address the ecological phenomenon on larger space and time scales with that was part of the argument for its, for its genesis, that there are funding mechanisms to address shorter perturbations to systems. And the three year grant cycle that NSF, for example, is pretty well tuned to that, but not so much to the longer space and time scales. So I think without generality in mind, I think LTR is, is on the right track. And, you know, that's not, doesn't supplant smaller space and time scales, it's just, it's a mechanism to support those when other mechanisms can be supported other ways. And I think that's, I think, the question brought about integrated perspective. I, my assessment is that this is a continual tension. We were funded to run a site and to do site activity and to draw other people into our site. There's always this, this interest in going across site in the way that Merle described on the coastal ecosystems on the east coast. Merle described with the pelagic synthesis working group that's currently working very actively. Now, I think that we can, we can and should do more, but there's also the US LTR network, but then there's an international LTR network. The US actually founded I LTR, and there are now I believe 40 countries that have LTR programs that can be interpreted a little differently in different countries, but we actively encourage sites to move not just to interact with sites, other sites in US US network, but other sites internationally and to scale up. Yeah, good. Thanks. Peter, you have a question. It's nice to see you all. Mark, you spoke to what you just shared speaks to the question I'm about to pose in some ways but I wanted to pose this question to all of you, running these or part of running these LTR so the first question is, besides just funding. Could you share with us the single greatest or one of the greatest sources of friction you face in achieving your LTRs goals. That's number one. And then the second question is picks up on what Mark was pointing out. What, you know, what are the benefits you see coming out of cross LTR engagement and how might we better support that. Oh, somebody needs to start. Sorry. I could try to answer at least part of your question. I think one of the constant tensions that we face in as LTR sites is when it when we're writing renewal proposals is where long term time series we need to maintain our long term time series and address. You know, questions that are common across the LTR network, but we also need to be perceived as innovative. And so we have to balance this tension between long term time series and also not appearing to do the same thing. Year after year, but we can't continually add new efforts all the time either. So I think that's, that's one of the challenges of maintaining an LTR site over time. I'll let others comments. Yeah, and this is what I described as mission creep where we're constantly adding new things that we think are important, but we're really don't have the money to do it. I think the point I want to make about this is that this relates to several of the questions we were conceived as trying to understand ecological processes as a network. What we're also doing, but maybe don't get credit for is we're Sentinel sites for looking at climate change, global change in ecosystems. And it's this, this dilemma of how much emphasis to put in both and what should be be recognized better as doing revising ecological theory, making a time series or describing a time series from ecological perspective of the changes that are occurring in it. Anybody else want to jump in briefly on friction, I'd say resource allocation. If you're a successful site and where people get interested in your level funded by definition you have problems with resource allocation, and this happens with respect to the benefits of LTR. For me, it's been really exciting to work with other ecologists who don't work on ocean ecosystems. Sorry, I don't mean to offend any of my lodging colleagues, but we, you know, we have for and we interact. For me, it's the, it's the, the high experiences of seeing parallels in systems in boreal spruce forests or, you know, a tropical rain forest or coral reef, well, that's a marine system, or, or a North temperate late, where if you elevate the research question to high enough level at conceptual level, you see a lot of common interest in common common ground. If you're down in the weeds talking about this species or that species, then, then you don't have the basis for interacting. But at the conceptual level, I found it very stimulating to interact with people who were working on, on similar concepts, in different organisms. And one of the, I think one of the most fun papers I've been involved in in the last 10 years was an LTR cross site synthesis on state changes, and it changed my thinking about our CCE LTR program. And I just want to add, I agree with what everyone has said, I wanted to add that it seems like sustaining those time series and keeping up the sort of quality control when you're always in training new people, always in training new students, new technicians. That is really a challenge. And, you know, you want it to be sort of keep everyone oriented to the project, understanding where we are doing so, so it's really, I find it takes a lot of effort. And it kind of almost runs through the PIs when PIs turn over. And so, you know, it takes a lot to kind of just sustain it so that everyone is on the same page of the program. But I will agree with Mark that there is, well, especially in our LTR, no one is getting very much money. They don't have a lot of time for this. And so they're all doing it because they're committed and like the team, like they want to be involved in this integrated effort. And it is usually different than the other funding that they have. Thank you all very much. I had a question for Russ. Russ, I recall back late 70s, 80s, there was a study of the Bering Sea. And I think one of the main conclusions of that is that the spring bloom there was not consumed much by zooplankum, but most of it just went to the Bentos. And I wonder if that's, I was looking at your flux, or I was looking at Kathy's flux estimates. And is that what's going on in your opinion in your area as well? Is that what you think that there's a rich Bentos? To definition, we have a spring bloom because the phytoplankton escaped grazing pressure. So, so, you know, the question is really to what degree, not as it lost, but to what degree is it lost? And I don't think we have a good handle on that. There's clearly a lot of transfer in our system to upper tropics. I personally believe, although it's hard to document that one of the big things that happened with the 1970s regime shift is less flow. It all goes to the Benthic ecosystem and more of it goes to the Pelagic ecosystem. Our time series really isn't long enough. We haven't had a big enough perturbation of regime shift to confirm that. So, and we've only been starting to measure flux specifically on cruises with the beginning of the LTR. So it's a little hard for us to get a handle on that. So I think it's really a question of the degree. How much, how much more or less are we capturing than what we used to? And I would argue we're capturing more in the Pelagic than we used to. But still, you know, we have rich commercial fisheries. So that alone suggests that still a fair bit get down. Okay. Ajit, you're next and then Josie, and then Layla. Thanks, Mark, you, I think answered the question I was going to ask in a positive in a very nice way, but I want to re ask that question slightly differently, which is, given at least based on my bias from 10 years ago when I was at NSF, the sense that LTRs are coming out of the bio directorate and have a very much of a terrestrial sort of an origin in some fashion with a whole bunch of marine LTRs being added along the way. Curious know how much of what are the challenges of doing this in the oceanographic context, minus the ships, I mean minus the resources, I mean what are the other kinds of challenges that you're basically dealing with, because there's in the ocean as opposed to on land. I would say in the pelagic ocean that chief challenge is that it's so hard for us to manipulate. And the, I remember our very first midterm review Jim Kitchell led the review team, and he said at the end of the review review mark, we would kill to have some of the technology available in, you know, in late systems that you guys have. And I said Jim, we would kill to be able to manipulate the ocean, the way you can manipulate no tempered lakes. And there are exceptions Kathy for example does very nice now in situ iron manipulations on drift arrays. There are on some dilution experiments that Landry's group has done for a long time it's Google does now, but by and large, we're largely an observational system. We rely on models, of course, to do numerical experiments and push the ocean and directions, where we can't actually push it in perturbed in the natural system. I think there might be room for some larger scale mesocosm work, which is much more invoked in Europe is still than it is in the United States. But I would say that she to me that's that's the main kind of structural differences that it's so hard for us to do long term sustained manipulations. Hey, Josie. Yeah, thank you and thank you for these remarks are just fascinating. So the committee's charges to be thinking about the decade from 2025 to 2035. And so that's looking out next 10 years we're already seeing a lot of changes in the coastal ocean and the deep ocean and I one question with the LTR network which I just think is, you know, fantastic is, what do you see as some of the gaps that exist now that we should fill in order to be tracking and understanding the ecological changes that are going to be happening in that 25 to 35 area. And then I had a secondary question about interagency cooperation, which is a big interest and I will say, perhaps a frustration of mine. I have a sense. When you were talking about the California interagency, I think that's probably a bottom up. That's because you make those connections at the local and regional level and you're building that coordination. I'm kind of interested in how do we help start supporting that more from, you know, the federal agencies down but I could be mistaken but most of the interagency success as I've seen is because people at the regional and local level build those networks together. So, thank you. Any comments on response to Josie? So the rate of sea level is going to increase, not the rate, but the high water is going to increase in the next decade everywhere. And so I think that's really going to put it front and center and a lot of coastal people will sort of be made aware of that. Okay, there's a real, we've always talked about opportunities where we're locally with co located with a National History and Research Reserve. We're the only LTR that is, but there's those near sites up and down the coast give us a lot of leverage to be and we do definitely work sometimes with them, but it would sure be nice to think in a more strategic way about interactions. And I would say if we're looking in the really long term, and we've talked about this problem of standardizing measurements, there's a fairly slow adoption of some techniques in picture money limited that could be common across all of the LTR sites. So, Mark's Zoeglider, Heidi Sosick's in-situ Cytobot, and these are the kind of things that will help address space and time issues that are limited by ship based point sampling. But the financial hurdle is acquiring them. And there's no mechanism that really tries to level technology across the sites. NSF started that process with equipment grants recently, but that was really to just turn over aging equipment. It wasn't really, it specifically wasn't to let us buy equipment to do something new. And I think there needs to be a little bit more thought about how we handle that, how we adopt new technologies and adopt them across comparable sites able to use those measurements. Right. Layla, I think could be the last question. Yeah, I was considering putting my hand down because Josie asked almost the same question I was going to ask, but I'm going to sharpen it a little bit and this is for any of the panelists. If you can comment, maybe more specifically on gaps in geographic coverage in the LTER network. If you perceive any. Anybody want to respond? Mark, you're always good for a response. Well, I, to me, when I hear gaps, to me, the tool gap is to me, the really pressing one I alluded to, to coupled ecosystem models, I mean, earth system models that are coupled to sophisticated representations of natural systems. And although I'm a measurement guy, not a modeling person, but I try to learn from the modeling experiments. And I'm very frustrated. Then I don't think models are where they should be at this point, you know, 20 plus years into the 21st century. I think there needs to be a lot more intellectual horsepower that goes into redefining modeling approaches. The second point is that the current version of model that what I see is that modelers depend on measurement people for parameters. So there's one way flow from, you know, from empiricist to modelers, but there isn't enough attention paid in the measurement community to sensitivity analysis of model or models and what the modelers really need to know. I think there needs to be a much better deeper dialogue that goes two ways on between measurement and model. And then the last point I already made, which was I think the model validation and the pelagic ecosystem modeling role this is not so applicable to you. But it's that there's a lot of attention paid to the open ocean, which in biochemical terms is very important, but the coastal boundaries by which I mean the first 500 kilometers from the coast into toward the toward the open sea. And that is often very poorly represented in the current generation of some of the best models. And so I would point to that gap is to me a really crucial point for the in the near term and the median term. There are LTR sites in the Gulf of Mexico. I can't remember the map. Merrill put up a nice map and there weren't any down there. And the reason I asked the question was not because of any particular geography missing it was really because of Russell's point that LTR is function as Sentinel sites. Well, it is it is a gap, it looks to me and then it's sort of strange because there are so some very unique environments in the Gulf of Mexico, huge, huge wide shelves off Florida and Mississippi River and so on. Anyway, I really appreciate all the speakers and quite interesting discussion I thought and we learned a lot. And Russ, did you have one quick comment before we sign off. Yeah, I was going to say it's a trade off between adding more sites and better funding the sites that we have. I would say northeast Pacific, you know, Africa, Oregon or Washington the Gulf of Mexico definitely. And I would also say we probably need a better connection between the the oceanic sites like bats and hots and the LTR network. Okay. All right, with that, I think we'll, we'll sign off and if the committee notes that we kind of what we leave this one right and then we sign on to another. Okay. Yes. And then we'll sign on to our normal committee link which is in the agenda that we attached to the stronger invite. But it's our normal committee link. Okay, thank you so much everyone. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you.