 welcoming five new members into our ranks, if you will, and we're very lucky to have some of them joining on the line today. Their official first meeting will be the meeting later this month, March 20th and 21st, so they haven't even been through an orientation with us yet, but because their appointments became official and we had this meeting going on, we are fortunate to be welcoming them. So, as we do with all of our co-sum meetings, we're going to do a quick committee introduction, including the new members that are on the line, and then we will turn to Bill for some initial remarks, and then we'll get underway. So, if I could just start, I'm going to have our co-chairs introduce themselves first. I'll start with Rod and then Scott. Good morning, everybody. Obviously, we're delighted you could all be with us. My name is Rod Mava. I am an underwater archaeologist and a historian at the University of Rhode Island. I direct a program that sits at the intersection of archaeology and anthropology and history, and I've been on COSA for a number of years. Before that, I was on the old ACA committee that supported by them, and I belong with Scott. I co-chair COSA, and I'll be rotating off at the end of the year. Thank you, Rod. Scott? Hi. Welcome to everybody. Glad to see you here today. I'm Scott Cameron. I'm a geologist. I worked at Shell for 32 years, and I've been consulting part-time, volunteering a lot, including for the National Academies for the last nine, and spent a lot of that time working with BOME and its sister, its predecessor agency, so great to have you all here and looking forward to a good discussion today. Thank you. I'm turning to the first new member that we have on the line, Rona. Hi, Rona Cox at Williams College. I'm a geologist and coastal geomorphologist. I look at extreme storm erosion on Rocky Coast and also effects of coastal land loss in Louisiana on tribal groups, and I'm just coming on to the committee. This is my first meeting. I'm one of those people who's basically talked about it. Thanks, Rona. Jeremy? Yeah. Good afternoon. Jeremy Firestone. I'm a professor in the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware. I'm a social scientist, and I've been studying public perceptions and social acceptance of offshore wind for almost 20 years. Thanks, Jeremy. We have another new member, James Flynn, on the line. Hi, my name is James Flynn. I'm an atmospheric scientist at the University of Houston. We do a lot with urban and coastal air quality as it relates to the recirculation and complex meteorological flows that come, we find along coastlines with land and sea breeze effects. Thanks, James. Katrina, another new member. Yeah, hi. I'm Katrina Heiken. I'm a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I'm a marine biologist, ecologist with focus on benthic community structure and food webs, and I work mostly in the Arctic and the Gulf of Alaska. I'm happy to be here. Thank you, Katrina. Les? Hi. Sorry. Hi, everybody. Les Kaufman. I'm a professor in the marine program at Boston University. I do work similar to Catrin's, but I don't like cold water so much and work more in the tropics and on fisheries, and I lead a program on coupled human and natural systems. That'd be you. Thank you, Les. I don't think we have Kelsey on the line today, so I'll move to Susan. Hi, I'm Susan Parks. I'm a professor in the biology department at Syracuse University. My research focuses on acoustic communication in marine mammals and the effects of sound. Thank you. Carrie? Hi, everybody. Carrie Pomeroy, research social scientist here at UC Santa Cruz with the Institute of Marine Sciences. Been on COSA for several years now, and my work focuses on the socioeconomics and human dimensions of primarily fisheries, but also broader ocean space use coordination and a number of other topics. Really happy to be here. Thank you. Carrie? Kevin? Hello, everyone. I'm Kevin Stokesbury. I'm a professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth campus in the school for marine science and technology. I'm a by training marine biologists and ecologists. I work a lot with fisheries oceanography and also environmental impact analysis. Thank you, and I don't think we've got Lori or Mary Louise on the line, so we'll come back to them if at some point they join. But I just want to highlight again we've got three of our new members, Rona, Katrina, and James are on the line. We have two additional new members that are not joining us today. The first is Jack Barth at Oregon State University, and the second is Lori Summa, who's retired from ExxonMobil upstream research. So we're really excited to be welcoming them onto the committee again. Their first official meeting will be later this month, and we'll put them through the full orientation. But since their memberships are now official, we are thrilled that they're able to sit in and join us for this meeting as well. And I'll just note the roster on our website has not even been updated yet, so we are looking to get that updated with bios imminently. But again, just thrilled that they were able to hop on the line with us today. So Jessica, I'll turn it to you in case there's any folks at Bone that you specifically want. I know we've got a robust participant list today, but if there are a few individuals you want to make sure introduce themselves, welcome them to do so at this point. Otherwise, we can also turn to Bill at this time. I don't want to single anybody out, because we have so many all-stars, and I know it would take so much of our agenda time, but just know you have a really great crowd from across bone social sciences and environmental sciences program. And we're just thrilled to see the great turnout so far. I'll pass it over to Bill for some quick opening remarks. Thanks. Thanks, Jeff. Welcome to the new numbers, especially, and it's good to see the ones that have been there for a while. Yeah, I just want to very greatly note the priority of this area of part of the action right now, and I think I've had that inquiry into our social and economic issues. And, you know, we're mandated by the out-of-continental chocolate and to address this in the environment. There is a long history of studies in that area, but I think you need to do more. And, you know, as you know, we're launched on this ecosystem-based management, which I think of as connecting another industry that's going to be called SOCS, and that's the status of the out-of-continental show and information data center. We're looking at like a decision-making tools, and we are giving priority to the consideration of some of the areas that we haven't noticed that are deeper, and then we're looking at justice, for example, and tribal issues. And this is in front of us, and I'm talking about as well as the COSA members. And I think that was to define what we need to do or to have an ecosystem-based management model that will work through these tribes and a number of social and economic issues is going to require a lot of work. So, this is a priority for the new members. I'm the chief environmental officer. Thank you so much, Bill. I was going to ask you to introduce yourself as well, but really appreciate you doing so there at the end, you know, and appreciate those remarks as well. I think we've heard certainly in the last few meetings that this is a priority, and we're thrilled, I think, to be focusing on it. I came up in our closed session that, you know, as context for our new members that we've had, you know, I think we started this committee in 2015. We've had a lot of meetings and very few that have solely focused on the social science aspect, so we're thrilled to be delving into that a little bit deeper now. I want to just take a moment and thank our panelists that have agreed to join us today. Just for format, we've asked them each to give a few remarks and let them know that they're welcome to share some slides if we have them. Excuse me if they have them. And then we will open it for an open discussion after that. I've developed some questions that I think the committee has been wrestling with or thinking about at least that we can use as fodder for the discussion if we need to. But, you know, I look forward to a robust Q&A from the phone participants as well as the COSA members. So with that, I will ask each of the speakers to introduce themselves before they provide their presentation. And if he's ready, I'm happy to turn to Robert Griffin now. Robert, are you ready to? I am ready. Is my audio okay? Your audio sounds great. Yep, and you're familiar with how to share your screen? I am, yes. Should I do that now or should I wait until everyone's introduced themselves? No, go right ahead. I think we will have you introduce yourself before you start speaking and then we'll ask the other speakers to do the same. Gotcha. Sorry for misinterpreting there. Okay, can you see my screen? So thank you for the invitation to speak today. I'm really excited. I joined the last meeting and went through the EBM meetings on video recording and watched them on double time like I usually watch everything on YouTube just to try and save time. So hopefully I didn't miss anything. And I really tried to organize my thoughts today around not duplicating what's already been said. So hopefully I achieved that goal. So first by way of introduction, my name is Robert Griffin. I'm an environmental economist. I work at UMass Dartmouth School for Marine Science and Technology with Kevin Stokesberry. I also have a quarter of my time appointment at the Natural Capital Project at Stanford University where I've worked since 2012 after finishing my PhD at the University of Rhode Island. That work at URI was actually on behalf of Bohm. It was on oil and gas leasing and offshore wind leasing. Thinking about the processes used and alternative policies used to do that. And so I've been working in this space for the better part of the last 15 years. In more recent times, I've moved more into the domain of ecosystem services. And so I think I'm going to probably speak more to that today. And I know several folks here are familiar with this concept based on my familiarity with your prior work and the recording from the EBM meeting and attending the last meeting. So hopefully this can serve as a review, but also as a place to kick off discussion, maybe kind of a straw man of where I see ecosystem services in EBM in the context of offshore wind. So one of the things I was asked to speak to today was what does ecosystem services mean in contrast to ecosystem-based management? Jason Link gave, I think, a really good description in the EBM meeting about ecosystem, sorry, about EBM being a broader management plan to sustainably utilize a variety of services that people enjoy in the ocean or on the lands, and while simultaneously avoiding bad outcomes and making trade-offs explicit. I think ecosystem services is a kind of a sub-concept in there where it's not so much the management plan, it's the value of the humans get from using the environment. And so when people do ecosystem service assessments, they typically use a systems-based model that translates a scenario or an action into an effect on the environment that manifests itself into a change in a service, and then finally a change in benefits for people. And so ecosystem services can be thought of as a box three here. There are, you know, many potential outcome paths here and changes to the environment from a given action, so it's not necessarily just one path, it can be many. This systems type thinking is used in a lot of different contexts in integrated assessment models, management strategy evaluation, and beyond. And so you could think of this as being, you know, pretty adaptable to other types of changes, including things like human capital as well. Economists try to measure the benefits here, so this final box in terms of net social welfare, where this measures the change in well-being for people based on a revealed preference measure of their values. These can be aggregated across people as a common measure as one benefit of doing it like this and, you know, avoid some of the challenges of using different units for value endpoints, which, you know, can result in things like needing to rely on trade-off frontiers that I know Crow White talked about in the EBM meeting last year. But note that, you know, benefits aren't necessarily needed to be monetized in this framework. You can measure them in a wide array of things, including benefit relevant indicators. So this could be changes in number of jobs, number of people affected, and a wide array of different, you know, important endpoints for people that could fit into different decision frameworks. And so you could think of some of the ones we're most familiar with. You have environmental impact statements used in offshore winds, cost benefit analysis is widely used for environmental decision-making, multi-criteria analysis. And so each of these could have multiple social aspects, like in multi-criteria analysis, you could think of net social welfare as one element, jobs as another element, environmental impact as another element. And at different steps of the ecosystem service assessment process, different outputs can actually feed into these different decision frameworks. So it has value, not just in getting all of it to the endpoint of benefits for people, but also in the measuring the environmental changes and service changes. For a given impact pathway, it's important to understand the area affected and the area of impacts for change results in on the environment, and then the people that depend on that environment. And this is stressed in the EBM meeting and it's been called different things. Ecosystem service folks often call it service sheds, but other concepts. And so for one impact pathway, you might have to characterize one service shed, but when there's multiple impacts from an action, you have multiple service sheds. And characterizing those is important because if you leave any of them out, you might miss effects or have unintended consequences of policy. Capturing nonlinear relationships is important, so just adding up unit values for ecosystem services measured in one place is kind of where this field of study started, but as really in recent years progressed to, I think, more sophisticated types of analyses. That's not to say that it's easy. A recent lit review has found that of studies that purport to be measuring ecosystem services only 13% or one in eight roughly of studies actually include the full chain moving from action all the way to a measure of benefits for people. And so this is not easy. Conceptually, it's being done, but whether or not it actually gets them practices not clear at this point. So I thought it might just quickly go through some, with this background of ecosystem services, quickly go through some of where wind energy and offshore wind siding in particular stands in relation to ecosystem framing and ecosystem services. So I think right now we're farthest along in fisheries. There's really great work being done to measure spatial gross revenue maps. Then these methods are constantly advancing through time. Some key advances remaining here I think are understanding the actual displacement better. So if a wind energy farm is sited in one location, what species are actually displaced and how long and to what degree? Understanding how or if these revenue maps are going to shift through time, we all know that these species are moving as a result of climate change. And so with durable assets like wind turbines that last for 30 or more years, that's going to be a climatological time span. And so these effects can extend into the coming decades. And then finally, maybe I see a key thing for this going forward would also be to try to integrate costs into these maps. So thinking about if you have one location with the same revenue, but it's twice as close to shore, so you have half the fuel and half the labor time to get there, that area is going to be much more important naturally to fishermen than the place further away from shore. And a map like this just doesn't cover that. And Noah's doing a great job in collecting this type of cost data and it can be spatialized and integrated into this type of work. But kind of only if you have the foresight to do so. Taking the fisheries example back to land, there's been some really great work by folks at Huey and URI about estimating impacts associated with offshore wind siding and fishing displacement on shoreside communities broken down to census group level or block group level and also not just economic impacts, but also job impacts and measuring those spatially across land. So you could have both a map of spatial impacts in the ocean as well as spatial impacts on land. And I think this was done for this Massachusetts Rhode Island wind energy area, but you could conceptually extend this to really any area in the continental shelf and try and make these same maps for land-based effects and not just for fishing, but conceptually this could be applied to wind energy as well going forward. A similar case study type approach was taken by Jeremy and colleagues at the University of Delaware thinking about how vessel costs and traffic displacement would be impacted by wind energy siding. And so the conceptual basis here for developing methods to estimate the private costs to vessels as well as the social costs associated with their additional pollution from additional travel time is there. And so from a mapping perspective, this could conceivably be extended to we have great information on vessel tracking through AIS and other sources. And so you could envision a spatial mapping effort like the fisheries revenue maps that show how much value of displaced vessel traffic would happen for any given offshore windside. You could think about this also from not just a labor and fuel and a pollution perspective, but also a life and vessel risk perspective. And the paper on the top right, Kevin Stokesberry and I were involved in, you know, shows what the challenge is for fishermen on their radar and navigating one of these wind farms. And so I think we're a lot farther still from this, but this is a pretty big issue for, you know, particularly fisheries which are already very dangerous industries and, you know, could have additional risk. And in particular, you know, we could use benefit sort of relevant indicators like vessel density to maybe try and position assets for emergency response better. But, you know, the type of information that might be needed for insurance, for example, so information on vessel values and people on those vessels and things like that to measure those values, I think we're still quite a far distance from. I just have two more quick ones I want to go through and then I'll stop. For recreation, you can also measure distributional distributions of recreation across space has been a lot of great work in this field already, in particular case studies around the Block Island wind farm and thinking about how different types of users experience offshore wind siding and, you know, their effects on their recreational activities. There's been studies done in hypothetical situations without the presence of turbines, we're just thinking about how people might react if they showed up. And so we have these great case studies, we also have some spatially distributed information from sources like geographic metadata from social media, as well as an array of conventional surveys. And I think these could be leveraged better. There's a challenge that this is all happening against a backdrop of changing social preferences as people will come more familiar with offshore wind. And so this is probably further behind, I would say, than some of the other work that I've previously shown. And then finally, Crow White mentioned in the EBM meeting how I think he had been doing work in the West Coast on trying to measure visual impacts or at least, you know, visibility of offshore development from places on land where people live and recreate. And so I also have done a study on this on the East Coast and was able to demonstrate, you know, a reasonably good degree of confidence about where people generally see from the places they live and recreate. And you could create these few sheds, which are aggregated overall, all the people in those places and where they typically see the most and use these, you know, it's not a measure of visual impact. It doesn't include preferences for what they see, but it does include information about the numbers of people. So this can be more considered a benefit relevant indicator versus a, you know, a social welfare metric, but still could be useful as a proactive sighting tool versus thinking about this after the fact and doing, you know, simulations, et cetera. And this type of data, you know, also can include recreational vessel travel. So you can see in this image here, for example, heading towards the top of the screen, the ferry route, and then on the bottom right hand side, a popular charter fishing area. And so not just, you know, you could say that if we aren't going to develop winds within 30 miles of the shore, 30 kilometers of shore, that this isn't going to be a problem. But at some point, I think we're probably going to want to be looking closer to the shore because the economics for electrical transmission are really an impetus there. And in places that have patchy populations or high geographic relief in the shoreline, you know, the answers to this visibility question are not trivial. And having something like this could be really useful. So I wanted to leave sort of with two points here is that every service I've covered, you know, tried to show them as, as spatialized. So thinking about them as outputs of an ecosystem service assessment, where the value map with a value map where the value impacted is from a sighting decision at a point in space on a map, I think moving in the direction of these spatial types of value maps for ecosystem services seems doable based on, you know, the research I've shown today, and much more conducive for ecosystem based management and also proactive planning than sort of redoing all of these analyses over again after every sighting decision. And then lastly, I just want to mention these last two services could be considered cultural services. I know that the following panelists are going to speak probably more to that than I have. And so ecosystem service assessments can include cultural services. Economic theory has challenges with capturing, you know, especially non-market values from groups that have sort of different preferences than are typically assumed in economic theory, and so particularly indigenous groups. So some of these simpler methods like counting number of people affected could be used or, you know, obviously all their more sophisticated methods outside of economics. I'll stop there. Thank you, Rob. Fantastic. I'll give just a moment for one or two clarifying questions if there are any. I'd ask people to speak, to keep these really to clarifying any points that were made in the presentation and further discussion or questions can be had in the discussion that we'll follow. For example, I saw Les put a question into the chat and we can definitely revisit that once we open for discussion, but I'll look for any raised hands for one or two clarifying questions if there are any. Thank you very much, Rob. We'll turn next to Kevin St. Martin. So Kevin, if you'll introduce yourself and let us know if you're able to share your screen. Hi, everyone. I'm Kevin St. Martin. I'm at Rutgers University. I'm a human geographer, which is to say I'm a social scientist. My focus is as an economic geographer, which is quite distinct from economics. I'm really interested in questions of livelihood and local economy. I'm also trained as a political ecologist, which is to say I'm very interested in that relationship between management and governance and sort of on the ground lived experiences relating to resource use. I'm going to share my screen and just give me a moment to make sure that works. Let's see. I think I need to share this one, which is you, but it's going to change to my slides. Okay. Is that working, Stacey? Yeah, I can see you. Yeah, that looks great. Yep. Okay. Great. Thanks again for this invitation, this opportunity. I think just before I jump in, I'm going to probably be speaking a little bit to a kind of how to in terms of thinking about how to integrate and how to really make a link between what the kinds of knowledge a lot of social scientists produce and questions of ecosystems-based management, but maybe more broadly, questions of sort of ocean planning and blue economic development, which is obviously very relevant here too. That's sort of my broad framework. I want to start by setting my timer. Then I want to read just three or four sentences from something I wrote a long time ago with Julia Olson, who used to be at Northeast Fisheries Science Center. I just want to read this. I'm sorry to read, and then I'll get back to my slides. As social scientists, we are heartened and emboldened by the turn toward ecosystems. Insofar as it foregrounds process, interrelationality, context, and diversity, long-held key concepts and starting points, indeed the very hallmarks of critical social science. There's more to that, but basically moving on. Ecosystem-based management approach we thought of in this piece a long time ago makes visible and analytically incorporates interrelationalities, multi-scalar processes, assemblages and aggregations of species, mutual dependencies, and a shared ecosystem health or well-being as the foundation for sustainability. Okay, that's our little take on ecosystems-based management. Then we say a parallel shift in marine social science will also be needed, one that shifts beyond analyses that presume and privilege a singularly driven individual human actor or stakeholder, the fisherman, harvesting from a single stock, to some understanding of human dimensions that like ecosystems, foregrounds interactions and relations, multi-scalar processes, assemblages and aggregations, mutual dependencies, and a shared health or well-being as the basis for sustainability. The concept from social science that best captures these sensibilities, we think, is community. Okay, so that's my little introduction just starting there to give you a sense of where I'm going. Thinking about sort of that as a unit of analysis, as an entry point that many social scientists use as the basis for the place of, you know, the oral history, the ethnography, the map biography, the kinds of methods that are used by lots of social scientists, the case study, and so on, that take place where they often take place in this thing called immunity. Okay, so that's where I'm going, trying to incorporate that very idea, that unit of analysis into ecosystems-based management and ocean planning. And on the slide that you see in front of me is a map on the right. I'm a geographer, so I really like maps. The map on the right is a map that shows you fishing locations. This is the very vessel trip report data that Rob just showed you in the fisheries footprint approach that NOAA uses that kind of focuses on questions of landings and revenue and their relationship to places in the ocean. Here I'm using the very same data, but really trying to use it to get at and link communities, often thought of as onshore, to actual places in the ocean. Okay, so here you see this is a map that I made like many, many years ago when I worked with Julia. And we were looking at this data, VTR data, wondering what could it tell us about communities in the ocean. And, you know, a very simple map like this, which shows you a bunch of dots, fishing locations, you colorize them by port. And what you see immediately is that there are territories of use, there are places of common experience, there are, and if you look at the data over time, there are histories of and environmental knowledge about places in the ocean that we can link to people on shore, right? So already trying to get at things that social scientists are interested in. Okay, so we took that data and we developed an algorithm. I'm not going to go with you through it, but simply we took what is now over 25 years of data that I work with. On the right, you see a kind of facetious map showing you the hundreds of thousands of locations that people have gone fishing. The algorithm on the left takes that and simply breaks it all up and says, okay, show me the fishing locations of this particular group of fishermen, which and the groups of fishermen working with fishermen, we tried to suss out with them. What do they mean by community? Who do they share knowledge with? Whose experiences are really similar to theirs? And we came up with that algorithm which cuts the data aggregates by port and gear type, which is to say small trawlers from Gloucester are in a sense a peer group of vessels where people know each other. They're constrained similarly. They have similar opportunities. They fish in the same places for decades and so on and so forth. That's our sort of hypothesis of a community starting point. And then you use GIS and you can come up with these hotspots for where communities go to find that way. The other important thing we did with the data is that we created not just hotspots of activity, but activity understood as labor time. So we could have done it by revenue. We could have done it by catch, but by labor time, what we think we get is community dependence and use of place. To what degree is a community dependent on a place, which is different than how much money comes from that place, which is another measure of dependence and so on. Absolutely. But we thought labor time was super important way to do this. So that's our sort of the foundation of that work. Again, this is years ago, but you can see here you can take all these hotspots of fishing activity, all the red, and you can start kind of carving out of it. Well, where did a community actually go fishing? And so you see there, for example, the blue outline, Point Pleasant, New Jersey, that's where Point Pleasant goes. They don't go all over the place. They go to that little outlined area, which you can then of course isolate and get a lot of information about. You can start to link communities to places offshore and try to get out that experience and that relationship as an entry point. And here the big idea here is if all these anthropologists and political ecologists do all this work in communities on shore, how can we link it to management offshore? That's the big upshot I'm trying to get at. So that data was super useful in engaging with communities. It was really powerful to take that data, put it on maps, have workshops, try to get at things like the meaning of those locations to those communities, their histories, their environmental knowledge, their local ecological knowledge, and so on, trying to take those areas in the ocean and really turn them into landscapes of human use. And that was arguably quite successful and really useful at that level of the community, right? But how can you take it and turn it into something that EBM is interested in, which is like region wide, which is much bigger than any individual community? How could you take that same data and in some sense project it across all communities and across all oceanic spaces by way of trying to make something more quantitative, make something more focused on metrics and indicators rather than just nice maps? Okay, so that's where I'm going. And this is what I've been working on for the last few years with people like Rob. Great to see you here, Rob. And looking at things like fishing grounds by community. And here what I mean by fishing grounds is quite literally where do they go fishing? And what is their fidelity to that location? How does that location, their fishing location change over time? Is it moving in response to climate change? Is it removing in response to management initiatives? Is it moving in response to closed areas, right? How does, how we can actually see that in this data community by community? And we can create metrics and measures of fidelity to those places, metrics and measures of contraction versus expansion, presence and so on, right? And I'm not going to go into all those indicators, but I think you can imagine them because we've got the data. There it is in front of you. And just to look at a few quick examples all the way on the left, you see a community like the large trawlers from Beaufort, North Carolina. The blue areas are telling you that's where they used to fish. The red areas are telling you this is where they fish now. A change in location of hundreds of kilometers, right, over time, which has enormous impacts on the stability and the coherence of a community, right? Think about families and think about social relations between crew members and the people in North Carolina. What difference does it make to go on much longer trips, much further north and so on? And it's an opportunity that only the very largest vessels can take, given how far away the, in this case, fish are migrating due to climate change. Another example, the map right in the middle, Port Clyde, Maine, a small community with small trawlers, that's what that is showing you. It's showing you it's all blue, which is to say it's all in decline. And indeed that area is contracting over time. We see a very different spatial experience relative to Port Clyde. The data can also show us places in the ocean that fishing communities that don't even exist anymore used to rely on, right? Because we have 25 years worth of data, super, super interesting. We can use the same data to look at target species and how that's changed over time, right? Here we're speaking to local community and court-based phenomenon as it were. We can think of species not just in terms of revenue and landings, but in terms of sort of questions of labor and employment opportunities. We can talk about cultural connections to species. We can talk about local knowledge of the ecosystem and species assemblages themselves, right? That relationship between predator and prey that people at a local level know. When you can make this data and connect it to that local community, you can start drawing out those kinds of experiences relative to species mix and how they're caught over time, which has enormous implications for ecosystem-based management, of course. And then another phenomenon you might say that we're looking at is with this data, again, thinking region-wide, this kind of question of port association. To what degree does a vessel or a fisherman remain loyal to a port? And when does that change and under what conditions? And if you look at these graphs, they're a little hard to read, but I'll explain them real quickly. On the upper left box, what you see there are a sampling of different communities on shore, different ports for Clyde, Gloucester, Plymouth, and so on. And this is for ground fishing, for small ground fishing vessels. And where you see a big red bar, it says there's a high degree of loyalty to that port. The vessels that come from there, land there, they haven't gone anywhere. And where you see blue, what you see is, well, there are some vessels that come there sometimes. And they're kind of part of that community. They're landing there often. The green are real interlopers. They come once, they don't come again. Plymouth has more interlopers, less loyal boats than other places. If you look on the right-hand side, that data on the left, I'm sorry that we just looked at, was from the early 2000s. On the right, we're looking at more recent data where you see the red, the loyalty is decreasing and all this sort of movement is increasing. Well, this is a phenomenon of, we suspect that there's a lot more work that needs to be done. This is a question of consolidation. This is a question of mobilities between from sending ports to receiving ports. And we're trying to characterize who are those sending ports and who are those receiving ports. Again, this is really trying to get at questions of community experience, the trajectories of different communities relative to sort of offshore pressures and forces and so on. Okay, the last sort of really data thing to kind of prove to you that this can be a set of metrics and possibilities sort of across the entire region. If you look at this graph, what we're looking at is sort of really changes in port activity. Like how much, to what degree are they still fishing ports and how can we characterize them? And on the left, what you see is trips from Massachusetts, Massachusetts ports on the left. And for every port, you might see several lines of data. If you see that Gloucester there, for example, you've got a wide rainbow of color. Each of those different colors is a different gear type that works and operates out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. And every box is a year. So we've got like 20 some years of data there. And where you see bright colors, that's healthy fishing activity with that year and in that port. And where you see gray is where there's no more fishing activity for that gear in that port. So you can see over time, there's more gray on the right hand side of that graph than on the left, which is to say declines in activity. If you look at the graph on the right hand side, what's that that is showing you is an index of diversity of the fleet in every port. And you can see in Gloucester, even though where you still have lots of gear types active, it's actually getting more and more concentrated in a few gear types. And so you see that index of diversity is in steep decline for Gloucester, Massachusetts, one of the most prominent and celebrated ports in New England. And this data, of course, we can look at for the entire northeast coast and start getting these kind of regional pictures of things going on on the far left, that really tall column, that's main, you know, which is showing you if you look just on the right hand side of that column and go all the way down, you see a lot of, you don't see a lot of much of anything, but you see a lot of red. And red is lobster, which is to tell you that all that's left is lobstering in Maine, like at a region wide level. Anyway, these data then we're trying to just finish up now by saying, trying to incorporate these data into data portals. We I've done this with a couple different organizations, but here most recently with the Nature Conservancy, where they're trying to build a marine mapping tool, they've already built it, but trying to integrate into it this community's data. And here the goal is when you draw an area in the ocean where you might want to put your wind farm or so on, you need to, from an ecosystem's perspective, understand not just species, but biophysicals, features and interrelationships between things. And to that, we are adding community, that middle level on the, on the right. When you open up what kind of community data are we talking about? We're talking about who fish is there? When did they fish there? How much did they fish there in terms of labor time? What kinds of fishing opportunities remain there given climate change? What's their persistence and fidelity to that location? What's the history of it, right? And the goal is really to link back to kind of full circle, if you will, back to experiences at a more individual and community-based level, where we can start to say, okay, how can we not only use that communities that see data that Kevin and friends have developed, but using that very same idea of linking geographically offshore to something onshore, we could also start to link to and mine, you know, the wealth of archives, of oral histories in particular, but other interview data that really talks about the human experience in those locations in the ocean. So again, it's that kind of essentially geocoding what us social scientists do. So that's sort of the upshot of the story here. And I'll end there and thank you for your time. Thank you, Kevin, for your time. Again, like with Rob, I will wait just a moment or so to see if there are any hands for strictly clarifying questions. There's just a moment for that. I'm not seeing any. We'll turn next to Robert Winthrop. And if you'll just introduce yourself. We have your slides, I know, but if you'd like to go ahead and share your own screen, you're welcome to do so as well. Just let us know your preference. Right, I will try to share them. So what are you seeing the? We're seeing the full application. So yep, you should just have to press that. And then we should that's perfect. We're good to go. Good. Okay. So it's a pleasure to be with you. I'm Rob Winthrop. I'm going to take you somewhere else in my presentation. We're going to go on land. And I'm so I'm hoping based on the discussion I had a couple of days ago with Stacy and colleagues at NAS and that the committee that this will be relevant. So I'm currently a research professor. I'm an environmental anthropologist. I'm currently a research professor at the University of Maryland. I retired in 2018 from the Bureau of Land Management, which is the terrestrial sibling of bone. And maybe I'll have a shout out here for John Primo, my colleague who I see is on the on the call. Hi, Rob. And I was so I'm there, I was socioeconomics lead for 15 years. And I'm going to speak to that program side in the first part of my talk in discussing some of the challenges of incorporating EVM and ecosystem services metrics specifically into a federal agency's workflow. And before I joined BLM, I worked for 20 years as a consultant, primarily on tribal issues in the Pacific Northwest involving resources and energy extraction, host of attendant issues there. So that second part of my talk, I will be addressing making a few comments about alternative epistemological systems, if you will, and how how can they be dealt with in the context of procedures such as EBM and NEPA assessments and so forth. And I apologize if I'm a little hoarse today, but bear with me. Okay, so we faced the challenge when stepping into my bureaucrat role, working for an agency whose unofficial motto was get or done. Bureau of Land Management has had and has a huge workload that would include thousands of environmental assessments every year. And probably any given year, when I at least when I was working there, there were somewhere between 50 and 60 multi-year environmental impact statements underway. That's a very, very large amount of work in addition to all the other work involved with a range of programs from oil and gas and mining and so on to recreation and wilderness and and burning the Burning Man festival, etc. The overall approach that our agency was really to just try to distribute expertise across the agency more than relying on a few key highly complex tools. And there are what you want courses of balance, but also you need approaches that work for the organization itself. So technical rigor is obviously important, but practicality and dealing with workflow also is. I find it refreshing. I'm often in a position of theoretical defensiveness when I'm in a multidisciplinary context, but I seem to be actually will be following a good deal of what Rob Griffin has said, which means I can skip a lot of that. Yeah. So again, agreed. EBM is a broad framework ecosystem services as can be interpreted in a number of ways, including in ways that are quite that are potentially compatible with qualitative ethnographic data. Like Rob Griffin's presentation, we founded BLM that cause effect pathways were a very useful tool for trying to convey the overall perspective of systemic relationships, environmental and social to a staff of specialists to range from wildlife specialists to petroleum geologists and air specialists and so on in many respects, probably similar to the professional organization of both. And one I will end with a set of references, but in 2012 we issued a socioeconomic strategic plan for the Bureau, which set us on a somewhat new course in many respects, but where ecosystem services was central scene with how do we make this work across the agency. Okay, well, yeah, another so another of one of these causal chains. And as you can see, this concerns your forest treatment mechanical thinning and then walking through six up to six stages of cause and effect. There's nothing unfamiliar here, but I would point out a couple things. This was, we found that working with each trying to bring together our program specialists and we had a working group on ecosystem services that involved all the key operational programs. And they were of course very familiar and were experts in any given chain. This was, but putting this into a broader perspective, help them see and think about relationships and in fact into relationships and while as here the one of those are hexagons represent particular models in this case fire behavior models here, blue models and so on, or wildfire, etc. You don't have to have highly quantitative system dynamics models. What's important is to have a logic process that can guide reasoning about causes and effects. So a mixture of rigor is perfectly workable and we're trying to encourage more inclusiveness here in terms of what gets considered. I want to give a shout out for a collective effort led by Lydia Olander Duke University, the National Ecosystem Services Partnership. One of the, I think it was Scott who asked on the call a few days ago, what are some good sources probably in the questions as well, what are some good examples? The National Ecosystem Services Partnership involved BLM and Forest Service and NOAA Fisheries and no, yeah and Fish and Wildlife and it was a collective effort to develop advice and varying levels from quite general to very technical that would be directly useful to federal employees working in a, excuse me, a federal context. That's the link and there is studies of how ecosystem services, now this is a decade ago, were utilized in a number of agencies and great deal ups. I'm just going to make some one last point on the practical program side. Very useful project that I commissioned a decade ago. Key research was done by Ken Bagstad, this was a BLM USGS study and it evaluated multiple ecosystem services models against in the San Pedro watershed in Southeast Arizona against four services and three action scenarios. The point I want to make here is that we kept careful track of how much time was required to achieve these outcomes and they varied from 10 to 800 hours. Now, this was early days and several of the well-known packages, I'm not going to go into which, who scored how, but a number of the well-known packages have evolved a great deal in the past decade. We estimated when we published this and there are a couple of articles that came out of that, that with better data archives and a number of other supporting factors, the 800 hours would be, or 400 in another case, 275 in a third case could be cut to 80, but this still represents a major spectrum of workload from very simple, quick and dirty, good enough in some circumstances to very sophisticated and from an agency standpoint, these differences really matter. Okay, I'm going to move on and quickly say a few things about the challenge of dealing with multiple outlooks, if you will. But up this slide, just to symbolize that contrast, on the right is something very familiar to a lot of people at BLM, it is showing employment and in fact employment falling off a cliff as projected in Pinedale, Wyoming. Something, there's no big translation needed, it's technically challenging perhaps to make these projections, but there's not a conceptual barrier. On the left, in one sense straightforward, excuse me straightforward, a cycle of subsistence activities among Alaska native groups in Barrow, the black showing the most intensive periods of subsistence, but as we'll see, what lies behind that schedule is somewhat more complex. Okay, so on a contrast is a thought exercise to assessment problems that BOEM is dealing with. Because I know absolutely nothing about marine biology, I took this as the first as a, I'm sure technically complex, but conceptually straightforward and the biologists in the audience will probably tell me it isn't that at all, but how do you minimize disturbance to benthic communities in doing offshore wind? Development and we have a, this is looking at the vineyard one FEIS and fewer larger turbines, decreased pile driving, that's one solution. In decision terms, this is a semi-structured problem. That is, there is a well-defined problem. You have to look for the potential solutions and then choose a solution. Contrast that with Sea views are important to many people, including particular coastal tribes. That to me is, first of all, an unstructured problem. It is not yet a problem, which is to say there is not yet a problem definition. There is just a concern on the part of BOEM and it's a very timely one, obviously. And secondly, it diverges from the benthic example in that it brings us into a realm of reasoning and perspective that departs from natural science epistemology. Now, to me as an anthropologist, that's fine. That is not anything negative, but these need to be recognized. And in my remaining time, I just want to walk through three examples here of my experiences dealing with native communities in different settings. The first one was a series of planning meetings done in the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska, that's about 45 million acres, which BLM manages on the North Slope. And on a contrast, we started in Fairbanks and we had basically an Anglo audience. And what we heard was further oil and gas development, I mean, there is really very comparatively little development, but further oil and gas development will abuse Mother Nature, etc., etc. We had heartfelt expressions of concern, but nothing that linked up with daily life, daily experience, or as Kevin would say, the communities that are involved. When we went to the North Slope at New Exit and Unictubic Pass and so on, what we had was really, first of all, a continuation of an ongoing discussion between the Fairbanks field office staff and people in the village. They knew each other. The meeting basically involved rolling out very large scale maps and getting very specific about what our concerns are. For example, there was concern over conflicts between periods in which they were hunting caribou, and which were being spooked by geophysical overflights. And so one solution is work with the oil and gas companies to schedule those survey overflights when they're not hunting caribou. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's not to say there aren't deeper feelings about this, but this is what you want. You want to have ideally you bring the social, cultural, and particularly the more unfamiliar into a realm where you can operationalize the conflicts. Two more examples, a pipeline, a gas pipeline project I worked on several hundred miles in Oregon running through seeded lands of two tribes that affected, that ran through large beds of naturally occurring beds of edible roots, which could still use ceremonially. The solution was to prioritize these segments, traveling the corridors as much as we could with tribal elders to get information on patterns of use, prioritizing them in terms of the intensive degree to which they were considered important areas for the resource, and then agreeing to a treatment of literally taking the roots out of the right of way, doing the pipeline and putting the same roots back. Just pretty impressive. And uranium mill, uranium tailings clean up also in Oregon, tribe intervened with FERC to oppose the action altogether. And when I worked with the tribe, really what I was doing is reframing the problem because there were two alternate, excuse me, two alternate sites under consideration, and the tribe opposed both of them, they were both in their territory. But in reality, one had very deep specific associations with spiritual forces, and the other was somebody's pastor. And having clarified that, the tribal chairman agreed to a statement that expressed general opposition to the whole nuclear fuel cycle. But if you go to X, we're not going to do anything, if you go to Y, we'll litigate. And fortunately, Department of Energy was able to proceed on that basis. Finally, just a couple of items about these references, which will be available. I mentioned the National Ecosystem Services Partnership, and I also mentioned the BLM Strategic Plan, both are available on the web. One of the articles that Ann and colleagues, including myself, did on the Ecosystem Services Review. And then three other pieces I find useful, well, I'm sorry, two that I find useful in what I wrote. Eight grand challenges in socio-environmental systems modeling and relational values, the key to floralistic evaluation of ecosystem services. And then classic work of 2014, Strange Case of Cultural Services, and I will leave it there. Thank you. Thank you so much. Again, I will give folks an opportunity first for any clarifying questions for Robert, and then we will open up for a broader discussion momentarily. But first, I want to just see if there's any hands for any specific clarifying questions for Robert. Not seeing any. I invite broader discussion and questions at this time. I did see that there were some questions being posed in the chat, so I may, while I don't anticipate monitoring the chat necessarily for the incorporation of questions or comments into the discussion, I will call first on Jeremy and then Les if he would like to pose his questions verbally as well. So we'll start with Jeremy. Yeah, thank you. And first, sort of just some really great presentations. I really want to commend the folks that presented. I thought it was really, really interesting. First, also just a comment that no one mentioned offshore wind as providing any ecosystem services. And it seems that if we're going to think about this in an ecosystem services framework, we also have to think about offshore wind, both displacing fossil fuel and its impacts. And then obviously, sort of going to Kevin's point, sort of the impacts, both positive and negative on local communities. And that could be if we think about port communities too. There's going to be some positive economic development aspects and maybe for some people some negative aspects. But my sort of bigger question is, if we can't monetize these, it seems the real issue is weights. So there was a discussion about using multiple criteria analysis, but then the question is, how do we come up with weights? And if we don't come up with weights to a certain extent that leaves, it really sort of throws us in the realm of sort of how the Army Corps makes decisions. It has like 17 things that go into public interest. And it says we don't have weights and we just decide on a case by case basis. So I'd be interested in how do we deal with this without weights and how do we come up with weights? I could start there possibly unless Kevin or Robert wants to jump in. So it's interesting. Yeah, those are great points. I kind of alluded to ecosystem service benefits with the recreational aspects. I think Baca Island Wind Farm has really turned out to be a balloon for recreational fishers. At least some recent studies have said that. And there are others too. I want to make sure we left some time for discussion today. So I tried to keep my discussion short. There's so much to cover, you know, so that's part of it, especially I think it's work out of your University of Jeremy with the in particular looking at how offshore wind farms can potentially reduce, you know, impacts of storms in adjacent areas. That's fine. Fascinating and think that more investigation could be put into that. But on the concept of weights, they're actually already partially being used in the stipulations for the lease processes currently at BOM. So you get credits if you have a variety of you know, labor agreements or other things. But I think that, you know, it's it seems somewhat ad hoc to me. I'm not sure how those are being developed. And one potential solution to this that, you know, I think should probably be done more. And this is not just a BOM issue, but things like NOAA too, where NOAA has the national standards for fisheries management. And there's, you know, 10 different criteria to go into that. And there none of them have weights attached to them. And it's not clear how important each one is relative to the other in terms of decision making. And, you know, I think those all come out of various legislations that were enacted, you know, in some cases, decades ago or multi decades ago. And it would be really great to do some surveying around these in the general public, trying to find a representative sample of public opinions that attach weights to all these various factors. I'm happy to jump in too, if that's all right. Yeah, absolutely, please. Well, I think this, yeah, it's a great question and so important. But I think, you know, it's really hard to answer when the focus is on, like, what's the weight and rather than what's the process by which we will use weights in some decision making, right? So what's the surrounding set of protocols and procedures, engagements that might use these technologies, these devices, right? So thinking of thinking of, I mean, whatever, why was taught many, many years ago in just using decision making science and multi criteria valuation about, you know, the potential for participatory modes of doing that where, you know, the goal isn't to come up with one weight, but to explore all kinds of weights and see what difference it makes as a sort of realm of negotiation rather than a technical decision per se, you know, like, there's just other ways to think of that problem as an opening to engagement and sites of engaging and using that technology as a forum rather than a black box that spits out the answer. Do you know what I mean? So, like, I try to think that way a lot about even these data portals and developing the data I have as not like, oh, there's the answer, but how can we think of the area of interest in the ocean and all the data we're connecting to it as a site of, you know, expanding socio-ecological literacy for a whole bunch of people rather than isolating them into these stakeholders with weights and concerns and dot, dot, dot, like how do you reverse it and make it a coming together rather than a breaking apart and declaring who has this much interest versus that much interest and so on and so forth. I know it's a little vague, but I think you get the idea. I think it was quite clear. And even when you do quantitative measures, you ought to do sensitivity analysis around assumptions because there's a lot of assumptions that are built in and you get the sense of what the intuition is on the outcome. And so I think your point is well taken. And as is, like, I would agree with Rob that there might be some interesting surveying that we could do to better understand how people balance these items. Thank you both. Thank you, Jeremy. I did see, Robert, once Rob, you raised your hand as well. Did you want to speak to this point? Oh, you're muted. Kevin made, but the point I was going to make. I'll turn then to Les because I called on him previously. So Les and then Scott and then Carrie. Before I go, I mean, was that who asked that question, Jeremy? That stole my first question. So Carrie and Scott, are you on the same thread we're on now before I go to a new point? Carrie, you're muted. Yeah, different. Carrie, go ahead. Okay. So thanks. Yeah, thank you. Lower my hand here. Yeah. I mean, and thank you all very much. I've got all kinds of things spinning around in my head. And Jeremy, great question too. What this brings to mind for me are which we talked about are these issues of scale and scope on the one hand and then we're not in contrast, but also who decides and who decides on criteria, who decides on what kinds of information are brought into a decision making process, who decides what the relevant human dimensions information is and how it's used. And when I say scale and scope, I'm thinking not only spatially, but also temporally. Anyway, it's a tricky, to me, it's a really tricky thing to wrap your head around. I think about some of the work that I've been involved in and some of the things I've learned about where you have to you want to be inclusive. It's really important because you run the risk otherwise of missing things that are actually critically important. And Rob, you, Rob G, you made reference to the risk of unintended adverse consequences. And anyway, I'm grappling with this as well. And I really appreciate the presentations and the discussion. And I hope we can think about how that moves forward or new approaches, new approach might not be the right phrase. How different ways of thinking about approaching this can be constructive and help address these myriad issues. So thank you. Thank you, Carrie. Would anybody like to respond to that? All right, I'll turn then to Scott, you said you had a new thought as well, right? So I'll turn to Les and then to Scott. Okay, first of all, I really want to thank the speakers. I mean, this is, I had to pitch myself that I wasn't dreaming. This is so on target. And Kevin, we're going to be looking for you on a different project. But we already have. But my question has to do Kevin with the dynamics that you began to allude to, the changes over time in the spatial configuration of the at sea communities and probably also their composition. How can we better capture those dynamics? Because one of the things I noticed in speaking with my friends in this case in the fishing industry is that they tend to think of the system, even though they're well aware of climate change, they tend to think of the system in a somewhat static way. And there when I push the conversation into what are we going to be doing tomorrow? There's a lot of nervous laughter and we don't get anywhere. How can we help them and ourselves? Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the things I've learned, you know, and one of the things I always try to impress is that, you know, this kind of metric and region wide approach and everything is, you know, for me is a way to link those more distinct and localized experiences to places in the ocean, right? But it's also important to investigate those through other methods, which is to say interview methods and case study methods and so on and so forth. And linking that to the very data because you can't get at those dynamics otherwise, right? Like here's the data shows, oh, this community's moving. You know, what does it mean to them? Why did they move? Under what conditions and so on, you really have to ask people to figure that out at least. I mean, my statistics friends would say that you can do certain correlations and come up with answers. But I think there's a lot to be said with just talking to people. On the question of climate change, for example, one of the things I've learned is that, you know, if you talk to the fishermen who fish is here, and here is in the middle of ranges of a bunch of fish that are migrating north, they do not experience the fish migrating north. If you talk to the fishermen down here, who's at the bottom of that range, they are like, no, those fish are gone. I have to go further north to get them. And, you know, and that plays in really quite differently to an understanding of environmental change. A lot of fishermen will, and the one thing that's really hard to get over is that the environmental change they are witnessing, even when they're at the bottom or the top of a range, unless it's really extreme, they understand as cyclical. At least that's been my experience with the people we've interviewed. And so convincing them that it's permanent is part of the hard part, right? On the other hand, from the other perspective, you know, you got to convince the scientists and the managers to really understand the localness of those experiences up and down the coast, which vary tremendously. So a fisherman is not a fisherman is not a fisherman when it comes to understanding environmental change. And that's the flip side of the same problem, I think. Yeah. So this is the scalar stuff, you know, that is so important to consider. Yeah. But Kevin, the implication is that there's kind of an anthropological weather on the ocean of things moving around like clouds or hotspots. And when we put permanent installations or semi-permanent installations that are going to have some kind of interaction with extracting a particular value, there's a real limit to our ability to predict. We may need to anticipate as well as we can, but then have a plan for how we're going to deal with it. Yeah. I will say, you know, one of the things, I don't know, I'm not sure it's related to the point you just made, but that, you know, the fidelity to fishing ground is surprisingly high for most communities, even those with mobile gear. That, yeah, I'll just say that, that's striking. And one of the big surprises, we keep like, oh, yeah, you don't move so much, you know, is really, and yeah, that's just an interesting part of it. Thanks. Thank you. So Scott and then Carrie got her hand up again. And I just want to also invite our bone guest to weigh in and partake in this discussion. I know there's a lot of folks on the line that have experience in this area or that may have questions. So I definitely want folks from bone to take an opportunity to engage and weigh in as well. I will turn to Scott and then Carrie and then John. Hi. So this is a great session. I really appreciate all the contributions from all the speakers. I learned a tremendous amount. I want to give a special thanks to Rob Winthrop for sharing some lessons learned from another agency, because I think that's particularly important for bone, even though BLM focuses on things on land, I think some of the challengers are the same. And I found it very interesting to kind of get an example of the limitations, apparent limitations of ecosystem services in advising decision making. I think you gave a pretty great example there. And I wanted to kind of come back to kind of where we started with Robert Griffith about looking at the services associated with offshore wind development in the Atlantic. The example you gave about relative fishing is, of course, one that could be where the benefit at the end could be measured in kind of monetary ways or economic ways. How do you tackle two other kinds of benefit issues that might be out there? One is kind of maybe not so quantitative one or not so monetary one impact on things like of wind farms on things like marine sanctuaries and avian refuges. I actually lived adjacent to two of those on the Pacific coast where wind is being considered. Is that something that's amenable to being tackled with ecosystem services? And then the other question concerns kind of uncertainties. How do you deal with uncertainties of what lies down the road? Of course, the world is changing quickly. We heard from Kevin about dramatic changes in the last 25 years and fishing patterns on the east coast partly related to climate change and I'm sure there's other factors. So can we bring in scenarios in some way into ecosystem services to advise things? Looking at kind of more than one scenario of what might happen down the road. I'm thinking as a scenario for the BOM folks is you guys are looking right now at potentially carbon sequestration in the offshore and one of your own sessions last year we heard about the two big areas being considered of the offshore Atlantic and the Gulf Coast or Gulf of Mexico. What if we had competing proposals for offshore carbon storage in some of these same wind farm areas? So this kind of gets the scenario question. So I'd love to hear what you guys think about those two challenges. I could start on that in case Robert wants to jump in. So on your first point, the issues associated with things that are harder to monetize and not fisheries or maybe some more easily monetized goods that enter into markets. For economists is typically in the realm of survey methods. We tend to ask people how they prefer things and maybe have them do choice experiments so they'll choose between alternatives that have monetary costs associated with them and various environmental qualities, including potentially buried mortality and that could be split up by different species of interest and things like that. It can also be gathered to reveal preference data based on where people go to recreate, for example, and if some protected areas have more recreators and they have higher quality birds or something like that, that could be another approach. So there are quantitative methods for eliciting those values. It gets harder the more abstract they are or the more nationally diffused they are. And so like the Exxon Valdez oil spill, for example, you may recall some of the damage estimates for that were in the billions of dollars and that was because they were aggregating values from people in the northeast and where it happened in Alaska. And so there are some methodological considerations there, but it's entirely possible. And then these benefit relevant indicator approaches that use non-monetized values that are also attached to benefits people receive can suit that. And then to your other question about projecting the future, it seems like you're asking maybe possibly two questions, one about exogenous factors that might influence offshore wind development and the environment around it and then technological advances that may be kind of appended to that. The investigation of these exogenous environmental factors like climate change that are going to be a factor for durable assets like offshore wind and fisheries going forward is something that is really a hot topic I think personally as a scientist right now. And Kevin and I at one point had a National Science Foundation convergence accelerator grant to investigate some of these things and we had experts kind of lined up to do bird population modeling, marine mammal population modeling into the future. I was personally involved with estimating changes in climate wind resources going to the future, which themselves under at least some of the more extreme projections of climate change are anticipated to be lower in the North Atlantic region. So the science I think is possible there. I think we're not doing it and I'm on the prior EBM meeting in June and I was listening to it sounds like you know it's a game of you know people are talking about a game of strategizing resources to answer questions and some of these things you want to know the answers, but there's other burning fires that need to be put out first maybe. Anybody else want to react to that? Otherwise, John, I thought that you put your hand down, but welcome any questions or feedback you might have as well directed at John Primo. Just to be clear. Well, I am if folks will engage me. Oh, good. John, John's coming off you. Sorry, I stepped away for a moment. I'm a little under the weather folks. Yeah, first of all, this has been a great talk and I really appreciate all the folks who showed up today and have contributed. My comment goes back to a couple of comments earlier and I'm forgetting what the cut stone point was, but Rob had mentioned Rob Griffin as opposed to Bob Winthrop had mentioned surveys general population surveys. And I think Jeremy gave some pretense to this in his later comments. And then Kevin said something that was a little more in the direction that I'm concerned about. One thing we preach as social scientists is the importance of context, social cultural context, much like environmental or ecological contents of the life sciences. At Bohm, we're very concerned about passing rags or ways of working that cross all of our regions because of the different environmental social context. Within that, I think I throw word of caution at a general population survey of values because our facilities, these facilities we permit or help to permit are in a place, in a time, in a space, meaning they're in a particular context, particular tribes. A Northwest tribe is very different from someone on the Mid-Atlantic. Kevin used the exemplar of fishers on the northern end of a range and on the southern end of a range and the southern end experiencing migration and climate change while the northern end doesn't know the pot is getting that hot. So just a word of caution on that and maybe that's a word towards some concern with models that try to capture too much spatial range. But thank you, everyone. I appreciate the contribution today. Thank you, John. Bill, you've got your hand up. Go ahead. Yeah, but let me ask, I just changed my mic and you hear me better. Okay, good. Much better. Yeah, just I forget someone asked the question, you know, who decides and the answer, actually, is I think a lot of people are deciding a lot of things. But it's, I think it is worth noting that in the case of these wind farms, there are federal agencies, including BOM that have statutes that they have to implement. So they're decision makers. BOM has, NOAA has to decide on some things. The Corps of Engineers has to decide on some things. And I mean, some of those things actually are already pretty well specified and there's not much discretion to look broadly about. And actually one, which is not such a large issue with offshore wind is implementation of the Clean Air Act and certain requirements that relate to not adding to pollutants in non-attainment areas. And actually the Endangered Species Act with its jeopardy standard is pretty specific as well. Having said that, I actually, I really enjoy all of these presentations and Kevin's response to a question that basically was, you know, you can have a model spit out a number, but maybe it's better to, maybe it's better to not try to bring it all together and to have all those, but instead look at a range of parameters. And frankly, with tribal issues, you know, the example that Rob mentioned is very much on our plate with the Aquina Wampanoag tribe of Martha's Vineyard that's very concerned about anything. It affects the, you know, the site from the Aquina Cliffs. And I wouldn't begin to know how to weigh that. And I wouldn't presume that I would be the right person to weigh it. So I, but then another thing to note, having said all that is, I think it's a really useful enterprise to think about weights, you know, because, because part of what's going on is, you know, the kind of the long, in my view, the long standing endeavor of sort of, what should I call it, the federal government to make decisions that are not arbitrary, at least, you know, programs that are doing that. And, you know, there's always, there's always the other side of the coin where there, you know, there are political factors that sort of intervene and so forth. And, and I feel like we owe it to the public to try to define to the extent we can why certain decisions are being made in a certain way. And we need to do that for the courts as well, which are quite happy to say you've been arbitrary and go back to work. So bottom line though, I find this really interesting. So I thank you. Thank you, Bill. I'm going to turn next to Robert. And then to Rod, if you still have your hand up, it looks like you've brought it down and then to Carrie. Thanks. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, so I just, I wanted to follow on briefly to a comment that when Bill Brown was just discussing regarding tribes and how do we weigh these and all very well, well, point well taken. And it was, in a sense, part of what I was trying to get at and saying, let's start by recognizing we've got different knowledge systems and work here. But I give a couple, I guess a couple of points. One is that there are multiple within a, within Fed World, the regulatory framework, all that, there are really at least two, arguably more paths by which agencies can consider, must consider tribal concerns. On the one hand, you have regard that the role of tribes as sovereign dependent nations and a government-to-government relationship. And in terms of environmental assessment, those of you who are involved with this will recognize there are specific requirements such as such as Section 106, Regulations on the National Historic Preservation Act, which provide us a mechanism for acknowledging, recognizing the importance of a property or an area that's considered to be traditional, of traditional value. That's, that's sort of one thing. And it works pretty much as a, in a sense, and I don't mean it's in a negative way, as a political framework. And that's good. In the context of doing social science, I think we look at that, try as much as possible to keep that analytically separate. And ask, regardless of what community we're talking about, how are their lives affected, how are their values affected, so on. So just to go to refer to an example made earlier about the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the native communities were deeply affected by that. They, as many of you know, some of them sued Exxon Mobile for damages to their, for their cultural loss. And ultimately, the courts rejected that line of argument saying it was not something that could be priced. On the other hand, they were compensated for the far lower figure in terms of the commercial value of the loss of fisheries, etc. And I think that was, to my mind, a right approach. It doesn't preclude a whole range of actions to indemnify them, but they are, anyway, there are multiple, there are multiple approaches and it's helpful to keep them separate. Thank you, Robert. I'm just taking a quick note of the time. It's 1.47 right now. We're scheduled to take a break at 1.45. If folks are comfortable continuing the discussion until 2 o'clock and taking a 2 to 2.15 break, instead, we can, I think, accommodate the extra time in our second discussion. So if folks are willing to stay on the line until 2 o'clock and continue this conversation, I'm happy to push back the break if others are. I will quickly check in with Rod and see if Rod had a question remaining. I know he had to stand up and put it down. I'd rather listen to the other folks for now, but I certainly got questions, but I'll wait. Thank you. We'll turn then to Kerry. Well, let me check in with Kevin and see if yours is in response as well. Kind of, I think, just real quick. Yeah, please. Yeah, I'm just really thinking about weights and thinking, you know, trained in GIS whatever a million years ago, you know, that whole field of multi-criteria decision making that tries to deal with this problem. And what I learned from that is there's all kinds of methods to make weighting, you know, make it fuzzy and relative and on and on and on. But what you learn from that is that it's fuzzy and relative, and it also almost is always going to end up being political and necessarily participatory, right? If you're going to use those technologies to kind of get to something people can agree on, that's one point. The second point is one of my big fears is that the data portals, a lot of the things I see in public about decision making that uses data vis-a-vis the ocean is extraordinarily primitive in terms of GIS-based decision making. It's like this polygon on top of that polygon and we'll get the intersection, you know, like that's like the first, anyway, I'm just saying like there's lots of ways to turn that into a much more nuanced and participatory decision-making forum rather than we keep slipping into like, how can I get a weight so I can make the decision and put the things together and get the answer. It's like, well, that's not even how these tools should be used, I think. I just want to say that. Thanks, Kevin. Kerry and then Jeremy. Yeah, and thanks Kevin, you kind of set me up. Yeah, I mean, when I raised the question of who decides and it wasn't who decides whether or not there's going to be, for example, minerals mining or wind energy development and so on and so forth. It's really about who decides what is relevant to understand in evaluating and informing decision-making and it goes to the weights question, it goes to a number of other things and so I just wanted to clarify that's not, and I appreciate that there are directives and particular missions of the different agencies and there are federal agencies in particular that are, you know, there's boom in particular, but there are a lot of other decisions that are associated with that and so we're talking about the relevant realm of social science research and related and information that results from that work deciding about what goes into that from the get-go to inform the whole process, not just BOMES particular mandate-driven decision-making is I think a really important thing to keep on the radar and this brings us back to ecosystem-based management because ecosystem-based management is not the sole purview of anyone agency or decision-making body and the human system is really complicated. So anyway, I just wanted to just clarify and appreciate the mandate and the forces that prevail, but thinking about the relevant questions to be asking in the context of conducting social science research and informing the myriad dialogues and decision-making processes, so thank you. Thank you, Carrie. Jeremy? Yeah, so just first on tribal issues, I would consider them to be off to the side. They're just completely different and shouldn't be thought in any kind of balancing or waiting or trade-off of criteria, so they're just completely separate for me. Going to John Primo's, I mean I have been a strong proponent of looking at community level like Kevin and when I talk about weights, I'm not talking about national weights and ideally we do it at the community level, but I look at weights as constraining the decision-maker, in this case, bone, and I think that's potentially a good thing. So bone's got a lot of power and it's pretty much moving in one direction and having a more structured decision framework could be useful. Thank you, Jeremy. I do want to take a moment again just to reiterate for our guests on the line that if there are any bone folks or other guests that have joined us that would like to participate in the discussion that would like to ask any questions, would be really appreciative and happy to hear any thoughts that you may have. I actually, folks who indulge me, have a couple of questions and as I often do, I'll apologize in advance for my naivety because as it's just about any topic we talked about, this too is not my expertise. But one thing that struck me from the discussion last June is we had a lot of, and I think Jeremy, this gets to your point maybe about the tribal issues as well, but we talked a little bit about guardrails and having sort of non-negotiable things that can't be quantified or monetized or and I'm just, I wanted to get a little bit of clarification first of all, how those apply in the social context and also what do we mean by that? For example, Jeremy, maybe my question is partially directed to you, what do you mean by setting it aside? Is there a separate structure within which you consider those values or those elements or is it non-negotiable in the sense that they should be determinative? Like if there is a particular value then a decision that impacts that value should be a non-starter. I'm just trying to get a sense because I know that was something we had some discussion about in June and wondering how those values or elements get considered in this framework. Where do they play a role in the decision-making and how? I'm not saying that if the tribes want something then it doesn't happen. But there's a government-to-government relationship. It's embodied in the Constitution where we've got three kinds of sovereigns, the federal government, the states and the federally recognized Indian tribes. We've got a trust responsibility. We've got separate from that probably a moral responsibility as people who've come and taken lands that were other people's lands. That's got to be worked out. There's certainly a separate movement towards both land back and co-management. Those are sort of things that need to be worked out between the federal government and in this case, bone and individual tribes. There was at least one example on the land side where the tribes said we're not really excited about this at all. But if you go here, that's okay. These are things that need to be worked out, I think, separately. Thank you, Jeremy. That is clarifying with relation to the tribal component. I guess I'm still wondering, excuse me, last June I think we were applying the terms of guardrails or non-negotiable a little more broadly. Still be curious on some thoughts on that. While I have the floor, I'll ask sort of a second question, which is we I think inherently have to splice identities in various ways. An individual person is not just a fisherman. They might be a fisherman and a father or a fisherman and a tribal leader. I think we bring to our lives, or we bring to these situations multiple identities. One thing that kind of struck me, and I'll apologize. I forget now if it was Kevin or Rob that showed this, but the decision was made to consider things by the labor time. And that's sort of, I think, one facet of an identity, and another might be a gear type or another. And that's just looking at their identity as a fisherman. Those people, so I'm wondering how decisions get made about how we splice different people's identities to determine their values. And if there's a way to look at the cross, the intersections of those identities, and determine that there are relationships between, you know, if you share multiple aspects of an identity, then you're more likely to have similar values or that there's no relationship there, perhaps. I don't know. So it's not very good at articulating these questions, but hopefully you're getting kind of the theme of what I'm asking. And I'll just throw that out there as well. Lesa, you're responding to me? Yeah. I'm always more, what's that? Should I go ahead? I said I'll turn to you next then. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, okay. So I marvel at the fact that we have all these sophisticated ways of describing clams and worms on the seabed. And we don't have anything, as a natural scientist, I'm not aware of as powerful a method for doing that for the structure of human communities, except to go listen to them. And it's like, Rob Winthrop was saying, I don't know what's so terrible about going and listening to them. Showstopper, okay. Great. Harry, go ahead and then Jonathan, and then we'll give Jonathan the last question. We do Les, but we don't necessarily convey it in the same terms. There's a lot in common, actually, in some of the terminology used. We do, we were just not necessarily heard. It's tricky, I think, in some respects, because among other things, when we try to describe a human community, we can't account for everything, of course, nor can we call an ecologist. But there's this really fuzzy intersection between social and political processes and social science. And there's a tendency in larger society, I think, to really confound those things. And I guess I have to admit, I get frustrated that it's sometimes hard to be heard or give an audience in order to share that information. There's a lot of literature out there. There's a lot of work that's been done, but it doesn't necessarily boil down into a tidy NEPA analysis at times. So I don't know, maybe I'm just expressing some of my own frustration, but there's a lot of really good work out there. I mean, you've gotten the tip of the iceberg with some of what's been described today. And I don't know. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear thoughts from others who may have a more solid perspective on this. Thank you. Thank you, Carrie. Jonathan, we'll give you the last opportunity for a question. Well, thanks. I'll keep it brief, especially for Kevin and really all of the panelists. Integrating oral histories is something that is really difficult, obviously. And Avinish showed a really cool way of identifying trends in fishing communities and then stated that it's necessary to talk to people in order to understand the reasons for the changes. But my question is, if you back up a step further, like if you ask a fisherman from Lauster, for example, what they thought the changes over the past 25 years are in that fishing community, do their qualitative observations agree with your quantitative analysis? Do they disagree? How do you reconcile differences? They agree mostly. And when they don't agree, it's almost always... Well, okay. The first step is that thinking of ecological or environmental change knowledge as individual versus as a knowledge that a community produces and maintains and modifies. So that's already one step. And what I mean by that is if you ask any one person, they may have all kinds of opinions that may contradict. But if you do your social science thing and you get the key informant and you get enough key informants so that they're saying the same thing and it's redundant, then you know what that community, local ecological knowledge kind of is. And you realize that it's actually extraordinarily accurate from a scientific perspective. But even that accuracy is contingent on the degree to which the natural scientist is willing to look at just the geographic area that the person actually is from and has knowledge about rather than like, don't you understand climate change for the whole Northeast? It's like, well, no, I understand environmental change in this specific place. So if you do that, then it's amazingly accurate and amazingly consistent, I guess is what I would say. This has been a fascinating discussion and one that obviously I'd be happy to continue. And unfortunately, we do have another really important aspect of our agenda today. And I do want to take a moment to thank Robert, Rob and Kevin very much for joining us for simulating this discussion and for providing some examples and methodologies for COSA members and bone staff to consider further. The rest of the agenda today will be a collective thinking about a potential workshop that COSA could conceivably put on related to cumulative impacts in the human environment. And we'll take a quick break. I'm not sure folks can still hear me or not because I've been disconnected. I can hear you. We can still hear you. Okay, fantastic. Thank you. I have lost my Zoom video, but just to say we'll take a quick break until 2.20. And when we return, we will focus on that potential workshop planning idea. Again, apologies that I can't see your faces now that I've been disconnected, but I really want to thank our speakers for joining us today. I hope Bone will take advantage and follow up with them if they have any questions. As I said, we are recording this session and we'll be posting it to our website too for additional views after the words if you want to revisit it. So with that, I will say thank you and we will see everybody back at 2.20. And with us this afternoon, we are moving forward with our discussion of workshop planning. And just, you know, as we give folks some time to settle back in, I'll remind folks that this is a follow up to the meeting that we had in the fall time frame. It was actually early December or very late November. And we did an activity where we asked folks to submit topics or questions themes that they thought it would be beneficial for COSA or the broader national academies to take up, provide some input on or maybe facilitate a meeting or discussion on. And we had a few topics that we thought might merit a workshop or at least an expanded meeting opportunity for. And one of those, in fact, the one that got the most both in our Slido activity was related to the cumulative impacts to the human environment from from bone regulated activities. So we just wanted to explore, provide an opportunity to engage with bone staff and to explore what that might look like, how that might move forward, what some of the key objectives and maybe guiding questions for that could be. What types of structures would be most helpful for bone staff? If there are any specific participants that bone or the committee would really like us to ensure we approach. And if there's any sort of known case studies or areas where this type of cumulative impact analysis to the social dimensions is being done really well, you know, maybe having some representation from that. So on our agenda, if you've had an opportunity to see that, I've just put a few guiding topics that I want to make sure we at least touch on today. Doesn't mean we need to cover them in this order necessarily. And you'll see I didn't assign any amount of time to each of them. But generally, again, I want us to cover sort of an introduction to any bone work that's already been done on this, things that we would be remiss not to know about if we do conduct a workshop on this topic, a discussion of any objectives and guiding questions for the workshop, any potential case studies or work at other agencies that we'd want to be sure to highlight or to get representation from to hear about along the same lines any other individuals that we'd want to make sure are there or groups, you know, of folks that we'd want to make sure are represented. And then wrapping up, the last two on the list are thinking about format and structure. And then finally, just thinking about next steps in the planning process and sort of where we go from there. I'm going to turn it over just briefly to Scott and Rod to see if they have any other feedback, comments or questions before we open this up for a more general discussion. Yeah, this is an important topic. I know that after our last meeting, Jeff Brooks forwarded a list of some of the work that was being done. One of the things that struck me was that this is something that is being tackled all over the world. This is sort of a global question and a global issue. Obviously, it's not directly for bone, but there are lots of there's lots of expertise internationally in this area. So I'm looking forward to trying to figure out where we go and how much how much we can contribute. And then, I think, Stacey, I'm right in thinking that there's maybe a possibility for thinking about this workshop as part of a fall meeting. Is that is that correct? Yeah, nothing has been finalized or set in stone. But I think the idea was that we could look into this being conducted as our fall meeting or an expansion on the fall meeting. So that is certainly an idea that we can discuss today. Yeah, I want to just build on Rod's comments there that I think one of the important things to hear from the the bone folks today is where are there examples in your portfolio? Not just we've been focused a lot on wind so far today, but I mean the totality of your program portfolio where you think this could be raising the game in terms of cumulative impacts could be a game changer for you. And where do you have you got any specific if you had specific feedback in the past, you know, where where you were was recommended that you try to improve or can you think of other agencies that you're aware of that have done a particularly great job on this and could be, you know, resources we'd want to avail ourselves of. But thanks. Yeah, and I'll just take an opportunity here to remind everybody on the line that bone is constituted to serve, excuse me, COSA is constituted to serve bone. So, you know, we're really looking to you all to help us understand how can we make this a productive meeting in an informative meeting that it will ensure that there are takeaways that you can apply to your work. So I'm genuinely interested to hear from folks at bone about what would be most useful. Plus, your hand is up. Go ahead. Yeah. I'd like to see if we can have in this workshop a focus on the transition from static cumulative impact analysis to dynamic. That's kind of the frontier. And that's true on both the biophysical and the social science was really three sides biophysical, sociocultural and socioeconomic. And that's sort of the nexus for decision making. I think that there's been huge progress on the static side, but the place for innovation and real progress, I think, is on scenario forecasting. Thank you. Karen, I saw your hand went up for a bit. Hey, good morning from the Pacific region here. Thank you for this discussion. I've been sidebar chatting with a lot of the presenters, so I really appreciate it. I think at least on the Pacific side of the house, we're at the very beginning of trying to identify ways in which we can do a better job of addressing our cumulative effects. And we're starting to try to figure out ways that we could recreate some of the work that's been done on the East Coast with respect to the socioeconomic fisheries. But I think what I'm really hopeful for is to identify that research and that work that has already been done that can help inform what those relationships are. So interacting and coupling those biological systems in ways that can be translated for the human dimension side. I know that there's a lot out there. And I think that this is the right place to ask these questions. So I'm really interested in exploring ways in which we can improve the current NEPA framework that we have. Thank you, Karen. That is exactly the type of feedback that I think is useful and would really encourage others to weigh in as well if they have particular objectives or things that they'd like to get out of a workshop on this topic. So I think now I'll open it up. If there's additional thoughts, comments or questions from both COSA members and the BOME, I'll look for raised hands and we can get the discussion underway. If it's helpful, I can put the list of sort of, it is on the agenda, but the things I want to make sure we cover. Again, that's existing BOME work in this area, objectives and guiding questions, potential case studies or work at other agencies, participants, and format and structure. So if it's helpful for me to put that list maybe in the chat or share my screen, I'm happy to do that. Just let me know if that's beneficial. Otherwise, I will look for hands. Any thoughts at all? Hi, thanks. And thanks for your comment, Karen, too. Maybe this is not necessary, but I keep thinking about what do we really mean by cumulative impacts? Like how are we actually defining that in this context? We'll say I think there are some different perspectives on that and so I'd be interested here from BOME folks and from others just to get us all on the same page, perhaps? Or put me on the right page with the rest of you. Thank you. That's a really important question, Carrie. I think you're right. There's varying perspectives on what it means and the ways in which BOME interprets that. So I always default back to what we're required to do underneath. And so it's pretty broad. I think that there's like three major categories of cumulative effects that could be explored. And I think that I'm not convinced that we do it in any bucket particularly well, but I think that has a lot to do with some analytic challenges that we have in terms of getting the right data and then speaking to it in a timely way. So sometimes if we had more time to actually be able to anticipate the effects, then we could probably do a better job of that. However, time constraints are what they are. And so we sometimes fall back on sort of what's already been tried and true, which sometimes misses the mark, but we have to be responsive to things. And so I think that the perspective is, you know, better go with what's already been approved and try to build on that in future. And so I think that's what we're trying to do here. In my mind, you know, we're looking at the lay of the land in terms of the current effects that exist in the area of interest. And then you're looking at the ways in which your activities may play a role in adding to that. And then you're also trying to forecast and foresee potential interactions in the future. That in my mind is the three big buckets of effects that could fall under cumulative effects. Now I'm not saying that we do a great job of addressing each and every one of those for a variety of reasons, but that's what I'm thinking of when we talk about cumulative effects. And I don't want to speak for all of us because I know that even within BOM, there's a perspective difference. So if anyone else on the BOM team would like to share their thoughts, I don't want to be the only voice here. Thanks. Yeah, certainly we would welcome any perspectives on that. I think it is sort of a key first question. Rod, go ahead. I was wondering whether there were particular studies that were ongoing that were right now that pertain directly to these kinds of questions. And then I was also wondering whether folks knew other agencies that were tackling the that we could learn from, maybe the EPA or forestry. So any of those kinds of thoughts I think would be interesting to know as well. I think a number of the folks here are probably already working on that initial SIBA study that BOM's been trying to push forward that speaks to trying to identify the interaction that could potentially identify cumulative effects. So I would recommend talking to Jake Levinson about that. And as well as Kristen Strelik, I think are the BOM leads that are working on that effort. I also know that California has a similar, not necessarily focused on offshore wind, but they're doing work on sort of EBM modeling for the California Currents effort. And I also know that NOAA is trying to endeavor into developing some level of modeling that would speak to cumulative effects as well, although off the top of my head, I forget what that specific initiative is. So I, you know, and then there's broader sort of national estuary takes these this approach. And I think forest service does too. So, you know, these are sort of broader, like I try to keep tabs on what's going on, but I'm not necessarily the expert in these activities, but I know that they're relevant and related to what we're talking about here. So, you know, I can always follow up with you to, you know, provide a little bit more guidance on where this kind of activity in federal government might be happening. Thank you so much, Karen. Lesson then Bill. Yeah, Karen, what Karen said, but I think there were two frontiers right now collectively across all these efforts to instantiate EBM, make it something real. One is the interface between natural and social science, which we're addressing here. But in particularly with respect to change over time, as I just mentioned, putting it in a form that it really helps decision making that is forward thinking. And then the other interface that is very challenging is between the total science, social and natural, and actually making decisions. And I think we saw that come up in our discussion. Thank you, Bill. Yeah, and I actually apologize. I was tending to a tribal matter actually. And so I missed the first question, but that Kerry, I hope it was general. Like, what do you mean by cumulative effects? Or was it more specific? It was. And Karen gave a very helpful response. Yeah, yeah. I heard Karen's response. And I just wanted to add the, I mean, this is a this is a long-standing effort of the US government. CEQ has been always involved in the effort to define what cumulative effects means under the National Environmental Policy Act underneath it. And of course, it can have meanings for under other steps, too. And I mean, maybe it's worth noting when we do EISs, we usually under the no action alternative, we do our best to describe that the not just the current but the future state of the environment. And, you know, look at the range of activities that might affect the environment, which are, you know, other than the project, so no action. And then the typical practice that it always has to be that way is that the cumulative effects analysis generally is tied to, you know, other proposed activities in addition to the action that are, you know, that are specifically proposed. And that's kind of added on to, you know, for example, changes that are brought by climate change, which we're going to put under the future state analysis. It's a little arbitrary, but it's the way that the way that NEPA is, I believe, generally being implemented. And it's really important it, you know, everybody wants to know what the big picture is. So, and I saw Brad, Brad, like put his hand up and this, I think the workshop idea came out of the science division. So Brad, are you interested in commenting on that? Yeah, I wish I could speak to it a little more intelligently. While my group does have the social science folks in it for headquarters, I am not a social scientist by any stretch of the imagination. And I don't want to pretend to be. And unfortunately, John had to drop off, he really is not feeling very well today. And Kristen had some had some planned leave, that she couldn't get out of. But I think, and I really do think that, you know, being able to craft this workshop in a way that would help us think about how to move from a lot of what we do now, and I'm just looking at this from the study side, so I'm also not an NEPA person. I was smart enough not to learn anything about that so I could never get dragged into it. But I think, you know, we are really trying to move, you know, through the SEBA study and some of these other activities and, you know, discussions going around through the government that Bill was talking about, you know, how do we move from the stance where now, you know, at least from the bone study side, we're approaching, you know, fairly discreet aspects that then would feed into the social science components of that cumulative impact analysis and try to think about how do we actually integrate those up front into an analysis that looks at these areas. And I think the discussions about, you know, really being careful about the geography that you're looking at, what you're looking at to bound these things in a way that, you know, you might be able to better look at this in a more holistic manner, you know, as opposed to looking at it the entire east coast like this entire industry in the US kind of thing. And so I think that's where, to my mind, you know, those are discussions that'd be really helpful for our folks as they think about how do we actually design this study that it would be useful in that decision-making context for this specific region. So I think we make, on some levels, you could argue that, you know, that the agencies not just bomb, but at least make big policy decisions and big decisions for the entire nation. But a lot of the times the actual impactful decisions are in a much, much smaller, well-defined, bounded area. And so how do we shift focus to really think about what are those areas of impact going to be and design those studies so that they can capture those things, you know, and maybe focus more on building an interdisciplinary team to do those studies, you know, from the beginning, which makes it more complicated and a little harder and probably more expensive. But you know, I don't think there's anything stopping us from making pretty large philosophical shifts in how we approach these questions and the types of studies we develop from a programmatic perspective. And so I think that's another thing that would be an interesting part of the conversation for me as part of one of the managers of the studies program in terms of, you know, would it make sense for us to shift our focus and how we fundamentally think about running a program like this, right? Is it better to move, you know, is it better to stick with these individual studies, looking at fairly discreet things, you know, that are well bounded, and then, you know, all the activity and energy is on the back end of that, trying to tie those things together. Or do, say, move to a stance where we're doing fewer, more comprehensive studies, looking at these issues, you know, in this sort of rubric. I mean, that's an interesting conversation to have in my mind. So there's a lot there. I'm sure maybe one or two things made sense, but I'll stop talking now. Thank you very much, Brad. I'm going to turn to Megan, Kevin, and then Rodney. Megan, you don't appear to be muted, but we still can't hear you. Maybe you're muted on a phone line or... I think you should come back to her once she figures it out. Headphones can cause a problem, I think. Yep. We can certainly come back around to her. Kevin, and then Rodney, and we'll come back to Megan. All right. Hi. Thank you. Yeah. And maybe it's a little bit of a follow-up to what Brad was talking about, but really, you know, bone with its responsibilities, you know, and governance over the entire continental shelf is kind of strategically positioned to do cumulative impact assessments, much more than the wind firm situation is the one I'm most familiar with. So I'll talk to that, but each one of these wind firm development companies are required to do a NEPA analysis and they, you know, as part of their COP, such that they don't coordinate or they're not required to link up nor do they really have the bandwidth. You have 17, 18 different companies. And yet, you know, the cumulative impact, both environmentally and socially, is really, doesn't seem to really fall into the realm of any... I mean, to me, that seems to be one of the areas that work is most needed and guidance is most needed on, not only in organizing and having some kind of a standard set of data and regular, you know, in time frames that are, that data is collected over, but also coordinating and accumulating all that data so that you can see the effects on the larger ecosystem and the communities associated with it. So I kind of think that that's where, you know, at least part of this discussion should focus on. Kevin, we'll turn to Rodney and then come back to Megan. Hey, everybody. Rodney here. Yeah, I thought the discussion this morning was really great, but and it does kind of lend itself a little bit to thinking about cumulative effects as well. I mean, we continually struggle, struggle with this. And I recall a report done by the National Academy, gosh, probably 25 years ago, about cumulative effects in the Arctic. And, you know, one conclusion was, you know, hey, MMS at the time, you're not the only game in town here, National Science Foundation. You know, you had BLM, you had NOAA, you had the state, you had all these other work going on in the Arctic. And oh, by the way, you know, the U.S. is not the only country in the Arctic. So what's everybody doing that actually can develop a greater understanding of cumulative effects? So I think the, you know, really one thing you need to understand or we need to understand with this is, you know, if we really I think want to understand cumulative effects, we have to understand kind of the before, during and after as activities happen on the OCS and kind of what is that increment from bone's activities that leads to different types of effects. These effects could be beneficial. They could be negative and impactful. But kind of how do we, you know, really find, it goes back to what Carrie was saying earlier, I guess, about the scope and scale. A $30 million program, we got about $15 million to spend on new starts every year. And, you know, now we're talking more about kind of the social science aspects, but there's a lot of other things we have to consider as well. We have, as you all know, at the Atlantic, we have the Gulf, we have the Pacific, we have Alaska, we have Hawaii, and we have five territories. So I think some of the questions we need to think about with regard to cumulative effects is if we could kind of hone in on, and I don't even know how, you know, maybe this may not be possible, but kind of hone in on certain social indicators that we need to focus on. But again, that would need to be done over time, and it needs to be monitored over time. Kind of back to the discussion earlier this morning, it also has to deal with kind of focusing on a place or a community versus a regional level. You know, I mean, we serve the entire public, but it's a lot different looking at the Arctic and, you know, looking at changes in New Exit and Cactovic and Point Lay versus the entire Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific, you know, as our activities that we oversee come online. So kind of where do we focus in on those things and then for how long? Because really if you want to get a handle on cumulative effects, again, it's kind of that before, during, and after. So we need that information now as construction is taking place, whatever development activities is happening. And then after they're up and running operationally, you know, how does that, how's that changing? So you would want to really, I think, you look at those and measure these social indicators for a very long period of time. So it goes back to monitoring. And I don't see how you can do ecosystem-based management in the first place without long-term monitoring. And, you know, I think that's really a key to really kind of getting a handle on cumulative effects. But so I guess the question I have as being kind of in charge of the environmental studies program is, what investment do we make here? And obviously we can't do it alone. So we have to, you know, really partner with other federal agencies, you know, any kind of wind developers, for example, that's out there or other kind of developers, whether that's carbon sequestration or any other activities that are out there, we have to, I think, work with, you know, other private sector entities, states, et cetera. This is a big question. And I guess really, you know, so much of what I keep thinking about is that we have all these different science needs. And if we really want to try to get a handle on this, how do we really focus our investment and get the, you know, find that sweet spot and get the biggest bang for our buck. But it's just something, again, that I don't think that Bones Environmental Studies program, you know, can do alone. So I'd really love advice on kind of where to hone in on certain indicators, if that makes sense. I mean, and they vary. I'm sure they will vary, you know, across geographic region, you know, focusing in on the community level versus a broader regional scale. You know, do we just use data collected in city and county data books? We've done that before. We looked at like 900 communities throughout the Gulf of Mexico looking at existing data. You know, but that was different because we were dealing with an industry that actually existed down there. Now we're looking at an industry that doesn't yet, at least doesn't have spinning, you know, thousands of spinning turbines out there. So we're really trying to get that before, during, after perspective, I think to look at these long term effects. And yeah, it'd be great to be able to monitor for the next 50 years. But I don't know. I mean, it's our 50th birthday today. I mean, I'm sorry today. It's our 50th birthday this year. So maybe another 50 years, but it'd be nice to be able to kind of get a handle on where we focus. And it kind of goes back to what Brad was saying, in the sense of, do we need to look at this differently, put kind of all of our investment, you know, towards a certain approach with the social indicators over time? Or do we, you know, keep just meeting the needs as, as information arises, as we do public scoping, as we do consultations, anytime we do a NEPA document, anytime we talk with a different state or community, issues arise. Different things are important to different people. So, you know, those, you know, and what the approach we've used now is to focus in on what are those issues we need to address, what are those science questions to inform decisions. We could say, okay, we're just going to invest this much money and look at these indicators for the next 20 years. Done. But I don't know if that's the best way to do it. So, you know, advice from COSA would be great here. And I, but I think these questions are complicated. That's fun. I think nobody's really nailed it well. You know, I've been here almost 25 years. I haven't really seen anybody do it well. So I guess that would be some of my perspectives on this. Okay, Rodney. Megan, do we have you back now? Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, great. Sorry about that earlier. Yeah, so I just went into, you know, piggybacking on what some other folks have said a little bit and just to frame, you know, from one aspect, of course, that we need to do cumulative analysis in our NEPA documents. And so usually, you know, as we've heard from other folks, we have to scale that, you know, spatially using a number of kind of approaches, I guess, to come up with some of those spatial scales, but then also temporally, often, we are asked, you know, as analysts to, you know, describe cumulative impacts on a number of kind of temporal scales, depending on the activity that we're analyzing. And so one of the struggles has been, you know, on some of those longer term decision basis scales, namely, you know, some of our oil and gas leasing NEPA documents, you know, are considering kind of the lifetime of some of the potential leasing and resulting activities. And so we're looking at sometimes as much as 70 years. And then going back to kind of what Bill Brown was saying, but that being said, you know, a lot of the assumptions that go into the cumulative analysis on, you know, what to expect as far as other activities are really based on, you know, projects or activities that have some things that we can kind of point to a permit application or something kind of in the works. And so there's sort of like, there's just mismatch as far as information that we have kind of to look forward on. And then what we're being asked to kind of analyze to and so we struggle a lot, I think, with those longer term spatial scales. And then of course, you know, on the shorter term frame, I think that's some of that's kind of easier, there's a little bit more to put into that. But, you know, just from an analyst perspective, I guess we really do have to be able to kind of scale our analysis based on the activity and assumptions going into the cumulative scenario. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. Last and then Bill. Thank you. So the idea has been put forward a couple of times. They're a boom having some kind of center for EBM or center for solving exactly this kind of problem. Now, ultimately, what we really need is a national equivalent of the weather service that has data acquisition, integration, analysis, and then it's put into decision ready format. But I think that's going to take a while. Different agencies are marching in that direction, especially individual departments of NOAA. So like NCOSS on the one hand, NIPPS on another, the EPA has been going this way. Maybe it does make sense for BOM within its own mandate to do such a thing, to set up a center drawing upon the talents already in the agency and any new that are required and partnerships, so that this overall problem is solved. And we have the necessary tools to do cumulative assessment and forecasting. That would be a congressional request, but I think a very reasonable one, especially given the press of climate change. Bill? Well, good food for thoughts, bless. And we have thought, been thinking through a step in that direction through a potential center for what we've been calling innovative monitoring, that the idea is to get on top of that. And we are moving forward with hiring someone who if we set up a center would be the leader that would put it together. I actually wanted to just make sure people are clear about how we do these EISs or how they're done. In New England, for example, the companies don't prepare the environmental impact statement. They pay for it. We pick the contractor and we supervise the document. So note that. And each of those documents is required by the regulations under NEPA to prepare a cumulative impact analysis. And those of you that followed Vineyard Lynn, the first company that got approval would know that there's a very detailed cumulative impact analysis. It sort of follows, I guess, the general lines of what I described and the species vary in how they move around. And there actually is a range that's described for each of the species that might be affected. And then I think everyone recognizes there's an administrative inefficiency in having all of these different EISs and what are relatively similar cumulative impact analyses. And so one step that Boehm has taken is for the six leases that are off New York Bight. And you may remember those are the ones that were highly impeded for. The auction was $4.5 billion, more or less. We are preparing a programmatic environmental impact statement for them. And it's well along the way. And the idea is the proposed action actually is to adopt mitigation measures, a suite of mitigation measures that could be modified given later environmental review but would presumptively be required across them all. And then the description of the environment will be something that hopefully can be teared from as well. And we're thinking about whether that same approach should be taken, for example, for the new leases off of California and maybe other things in the future. So I don't pretend we've solved the cumulative effects challenge generally, but that's what we're doing right now. And they'll be, I'm not sure exactly when the draft EIS from New York Bight will be out, but it'll be out and they'll be, I'm sure, a lot of intense public comment on it. Thank you, Bill. Oh, Scott, you're raising your hand. I'm very excited about your last comment, Bill, about revisiting starting up programmatic EISs for individual subsections of the wind leasing program. I got a great idea, long overdue. And I'm impressed by some of the comments that have come here. I'm wondering if there might be a bit of a common thread for some of this. I think Kevin brought up the potential value of getting a consistent set of format, consistent definition and approach and data set for defining cumulative impacts for a common definition, also an assessment methodology that might be usable for multiple programmatic EISs, and maybe not just for wind, but maybe for other parts of your huge program that is going to continue to expand, you're going to get asked to do more and more. And it wouldn't be nice if we had to compare between them. And maybe getting those guidelines could be something that could be a candidate for funding in Rodney's program this coming year. Maybe there's a set of guidelines that could be formulated that could be consistent. That might be an investment worth making. I'm looking for ways to leverage your limited resource. I do think Rod, you brought this up. You have a very small organization. You are charged with a huge waterfront to look after. It's going to get bigger. And being able to leverage expertise and share resources with other agencies would be really helpful. Maybe they'd have common interest in kind of marine-oriented, cumulative impacts being assessed in similar ways so different agencies could share information and data sets. They might have, in some of these areas, you're going to be going into that are new for you, new geographies. Some other agencies might have a lot of data that could be useful to you, for example. And the other thing I'm thinking about is I think it was a comment that I think last made right at the beginning about the importance of the dynamic aspects and scenarios. I'm wondering, you know, a lot of what clearly things are changing pretty rapidly. Somehow, if we can build into our cumulative impact analysis scenarios about what the future might look like, it's not always going to be just one set of how comes. And modeling or considering a kind of a range of scenarios or at least a couple might be very helpful to decision makers. So anyhow, some thoughts there. Scott, Brad, I see your hand up. I'm going to get turned to you here in just a moment, but I just want to take a second because the absolute last thing that I want to do is shut down productive conversation and discussion, which I think we're having right now. I do want us to also circle back to the workshop opportunity and think about how we might implement that to touch on some of this, what that might look like and include. And also just to remind folks that we did have the discussion about broad cumulative impacts previously. I don't want to lose sight of the fact that this particular opportunity that we talked about would be focused on cumulative impacts to the human environment as sort of a continuation of that social dynamic conversation that we've been trying to have. So just to pull the attention back there a little bit, but again, I don't want to shut down the conversation at all. I think there's a lot of great ideas being shared and so I welcome that whatever we can do to engage with them constructively. So Brad and Bill and we'll continue to have the conversation. I'll be listening for pieces that I can pull into that workshop planning. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things came up in the chat that I wanted to touch on a little bit. So I think we'll take them in reverse order that I was thinking. But yes, there's a question about BOM studies program being a coordinator of different projects and programs, not studies program, but the BOM environmental group at large or synthesizer or direct. I think we have to wear a lot of hats. I think there have been some great opportunities in the past where we have taken that leadership position and built that coalition of folks to try to go out and tackle something a little bigger than we could do on our own that had those broader reaching impacts to other agencies. And one of the ways that we're doing that right now, talking about the expanding jurisdiction and having to do more and more is looking at the expansion of BOM's jurisdiction into the territories. One of the first things we did was we reached out to our friends at NCOS and to see and try to find out who's already working there. What are they doing? Who should we be in contact with on the ground in those areas? And how do we walk in to those conversations with a coalition of the federal folks that are going to need to be making the decisions all around this and do that in a collaborative manner from the beginning? I think we sit in both stances some of the time. But it is hard for us to do that being as small as we are. We don't have the heft of the NSF or the NOAA or USGS budget behind us to make people stand up and pay attention. There was a question in the chat about the acute impacts and how we think about that for archaeological resources. And I would also probably roll in some of the paleocultural resources as well into that. And Jamie Moore is on the call today. So I just wanted to give him an opportunity to talk about that briefly and how we think about the archaeological and paleocultural issues within the context of this conversation. Can you hear me? Yep. Okay. Yeah, just speaking in terms of the archaeological studies, generally they've been focused on more discrete areas looking at specific environmental parameters. How could the local marine environment be impacting these sites, primary for site formation processes? And also, how are the shipwrecks functioning as reef habitat? How are they supporting specific biological, microbiological communities? There hasn't been too much of a focus at the present time on longer-term cumulative impacts. In terms of the paleocultural studies, we're supporting research, you know, which environments may feature these landforms? How may they be preserved? How can we better identify them, get a grasp on what may be there? Once again, there hasn't been too much of a focus on longer-term cumulative impacts on that because we're still in the phase of trying to better determine where they actually be located and how they are preserved. We do have a study that will be kicking off soon that's more focused on how could pending sea level rise impact certain archaeological sites, including these paleocultural environments. We did try to get a study like that going a couple years back, but that was stopped due to administration priorities at that time from the previous administration. So that's kind of where we are at the present time. We're just now getting to a point where I think we could focus more on longer-term cumulative impacts, but we're still at the point of trying to understand how the environments are either preserving the sites or how they're supporting specific habitats. Thank you, Jane. Bill? Yeah, just quickly. Actually, let me note, since our theology came up, we proposed a regulation whose comment period is open until April 17th to improve our regulations for archaeological protection. And the big thing, for those of you that have followed, is we would finally definitively establish that a survey for gulf, this is for oil and gas, is required before a company can drill. And it's been sort of up in the air. What I wanted to do, Stacey, I was actually listening to you. I think maybe with this area that we're talking about, it's probably worth noting that the New York BITE programmatic EIS has included a really intensive effort to address environmental justice. And we've had a group of staff, Megan Cornelius recently joined that and Brian Jordan Fison has been a leader. But we reached out to a number of community organizers and state agencies, of course, in the New York area. We've had a number of meetings with them. We had an initial round table to get ideas. We have draft best practices that we put together that we want to integrate into the EIS related to advancing environmental justice. And then we're actually hosting with the group of people that we've identified. It's one of the hard things in this is to find out who's really the group of individuals, not just through like a rule making and a comment that you should be really working with. And that we do have sort of working lists and we're holding these forums. We've never done that before, which are quarterly for New York BITE. And we're thinking about using what we've done there elsewhere. And I mean, discussions, they certainly, they're not just the impact. They're diverse. Let me just say that in terms of what people are concerned about. So what they're interested in. So note that, trying to figure out environmental justice as much on, you know, much on our table. Thank you for that, Bill. All right. Oh, Jessica? Yeah, I appreciate what a lot of the COSA members have been saying in terms of ideas. I know I've heard it from less a couple of times and from Scott kind of echoing, you know, helping bomb figure out, you know, this kind of predictive aspect to cumulative impacts. These are such dynamic systems as Kerry's been pointing out. You know, how do you have any level of confidence in this rapidly changing world about the human impacts? I think that is just such a tricky thing to wrap your head around. How do you, you know, for example, as Bill was just mentioning, these environmental justice impacts, we can talk to communities now, we can take a programmatic approach, but how do you actually, you know, look across, integrate that local perspective and have have a way of analyzing in a way that that forecasts scenarios to inform decision makers. I think it's just such a tricky space. I also think that it integrates really well with a lot of efforts that we're working on right now. We mentioned the the Center for Innovative Ocean Monitoring, you know, we're going to be starting to build toward that. This is a really great way to get the right kinds of data that we would need to inform such scenario forecasting. And so I think some some kind of workshop that helps kind of knit our ecosystems, visa management work with that Center for Innovative Ocean Monitoring and really taking a hard look at the human impacts. If you can find like a nexus between those three things, I think that would be just so helpful for BOM and as Scott was mentioning thinking about, you know, how we can request additional funding from Congress, etc. Thanks, Jessica. I think finding the nexus in those three things would be would be for a fascinating topic and welcome additional input on on how we constructed and conduct that. So, you know, they'll eager for input from from anybody on the line that would like to share it. Kevin, I'll turn to you next. Yeah, thank you. So I guess and this is kind of a question a little bit for Bill maybe and Rodney and the so in the state of the ecosystem 2022 report that Noel put out, they seem to be trying to do at least a first draft of cumulative impacts of the of the wind firm development. And they also in that document have a social justice and social justice and vulnerability metric where they rate the different ports up and down the coast. And then they look at the, you know, it's more in a fishing context context. Is that the kind of is that the kind of thing that this workshop would would help with that kind of human dimension that Stacy was talking about? Is that Kevin? I mean, my reaction is it sounds, you know, relevant to the workshop is something that we ought to present when we have the workshop to factor in. Kevin, also we again kind of like what I was leading to earlier with this, you know, what other social indicators are needed as well. I mean, you know, nobody, I mean, all of our partners, most of them deal with oceans. And, you know, we have in our mandate the human environment. So we're looking at, you know, not only, you know, the fisheries aspects like, you know, nymphs does, we partner with them all the time. But, you know, port expansion, you know, infrastructure, what are the infrastructure needs on shore to support offshore activity, job creation, you know, economic input output modeling with regard to where those jobs located in what county, in what community, in what place, what kind of jobs. So those socioeconomic type indicators are important as well. And, you know, a lot of the questions we ask rightly so. I don't think a lot of other ocean agencies are and there are others out there that may be doing this, but, you know, our focus on those, you know, are the development activities, you know, 30 miles out, 100 miles out, you know, it's just we're a little bit, you know, different animal in that case, in that sense. So, you know, I go to these, you know, the subcommittee on ocean science and technology meetings, National Oceanographic Partnership Program, and some, you know, try to get partners sometimes on the socioeconomics and socioeconomics monitoring and cumulative effects. And while there's more interest now than there has been in the past, you know, it can be a tough sell to certain, you know, agencies. No one wants to focus on the fishery stuff. And you got to find kind of an angle, you know, to get their interest. But what we're really doing now, NOP has taken a reboot. There's a NOP 2.0 strategic plan that's coming out, hasn't come out yet. And I think a big part of that is something I've been pushing for years is to really push NOP to do more work with the private sector. So I think, you know, there are a lot of opportunities there moving forward to really cost share with the private sector that I think we haven't really looked at in the past. So, you know, kind of across the board, the feds are thinking about certain things here. And if we're really looking at kind of the holistic aspects of any kind of development activity, you know, we have to focus on the human environment and those onshore impacts from offshore activity. So that's kind of where I think a big push, at least what I've been trying to do is I think getting ingrained in people's minds a bit more. But it can be a hard sell to certain, you know, often the Office of Exploration Research, you know, OER, they're explorers, you know, they're exploring the emotions. So, you know, they're certain, you got to find an angle for them. That makes sense. Rodney, I see a lot of folks are, I think, digesting some of what we're hearing. And, you know, definitely want to give folks another moment or so to think about whether or not either they have some additional input or feedback that they'd like us to consider as we move forward with this or any additional questions as well. You know, I'm looking through our list of points, as I mentioned earlier, thinking about a workshop and thinking about, you know, a potential agenda, looking at it from that perspective, thinking about an introduction from BOM on its relevant work and the objectives and guiding questions, potential case studies or work at other agencies, potential participants. And while we haven't necessarily gone through and identified individuals, I think we've kind of touched on a lot of these points, if tangentially. And so, you know, certainly I think COSA is still going to have their work ahead of them in terms of digesting what we're hearing and translating that into a meaningful workshop. But, you know, continue to welcome input and feedback on this. We've got plenty of time to discuss it today. Or if there are thoughts that pop up after today's meeting, we certainly welcome that as well. So I'll give folks another couple of minutes to see if we can get any additional discussion. Let me just say something kind of respond a little more to Kevin's point and be supportive. I think that BOM recognizes that the sort of the things like environmental justice analyses in our EISs have long needed to be strengthened. And that includes immediately the impacts and cumulative effects. And now that we have a many different policy directives from the White House, you know, that are related to this, all the more of a need to really dig into that. And so I would look, I mean, I'd like Jessica's sort of way of describing the workshop. But it could be quite important actually in putting us into a place where we do better as an agency on that front. And, you know, obviously we should, you know, if we do this, we ought to, for example, have some kind of a summary of some of the key references and initiatives that others have taken like NOAA that feed into it. Yeah. And we want to consider, you know, what is within the purview of COSA in terms of our role as a standing committee and the, you know, production of anything that comes from that. But certainly, you know, we can put together briefing materials and advance the meetings and make those available to both COSA members and, you know, on our website. Depending on, you know, assuming we have the permission to share any documents. But, you know, I think having a strong reference list or some strong read ahead materials could really enhance this discussion as well. And we'd be happy to coordinate with BOM to collect those and, you know, make sure we're including some relevant ones. If there are any that folks are aware of in advance, by all means, you know, I welcome you to share those. And I'll just reiterate that if we are thinking about this as a topic for the fall meeting, you know, to be able to get that under, get planning for that underway as soon as possible and provide as much time as possible to both our COSA members as well as potential participants to review and digest the materials ahead of time, I think would be helpful. Scott, and then Brad? Yeah, I just had a question. I guess it may be really for Bill, because you brought it up initially that, you know, going forward at least, you're going to try to have, you know, a bigger area of geography covered by some of these new programmatic EISs. You've also been identifying for the contractors who were the candidates who would undertake these EIS documents for them. And Kevin Horst brought up the question, would you would be great to have consistency, you know, kind of in our, in how cumulative impacts are addressed and assessed, you know, across different aspects of the program, so things can be compared. I guess I failed to capture at the time here. Of course, those EISs and cumulative impact assessments cover both the kind of the natural systems, you know, what happens to the animals and the creatures in the ocean systems and what happens to the humans. But are you seeing the biggest gap, if you will, in terms of how cumulative impacts are assessed is really more with the human dimension or is it the totality of the whole process? Where do you need the most help? I actually, I think we need help on many fronts, but I do think we have, we have, there's more room for improvement and strengthening these EISs, kind of low hanging fruit probably when it comes to the, you know, social, economic, you know, because, you know, and if you've read the EISs in the past, they, you know, they usually are pretty detailed and specific about what's going to happen to a marine mammal that when you get to them. Right. Yeah, right, so. Yeah, that was my recollection. Yes, I'm with you on that question. Okay. We need more social scientists and economists and bone that strengthen us there. Thanks, Scott and Bill. Brad and then Rod. Yeah, and this might be me asking this question out of a little bit of ignorance, but I think to my mind, something that could potentially be useful coming out of that workshop is one, I think more discussion around that question of the geographic scope of these types of analyses, like what are those appropriate geographic scopes? And then how do we tie those tie that to either the NEPA analysis or some other things that were, I mean, like it or not, federal agencies are required to do things in certain ways by legislation that don't always make sense. Right. And so we have to do some of these things when we put them out there and like, yeah, we did it. But if you're looking at it as someone to stay affected by that action potentially, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And, you know, you know, so I think discussion around, you know, identifying those appropriate scopes, you can, that acute impact analysis for that activity would actually affect. And I think to my mind, I would want to sort of bifurcate how we think about talking about that, because part of that has to go into the NEPA analysis. But I think we should probably be thinking about how we can do a better job of just communicating those types of things to the public as well, right? How can we then take that and speak about it in a way to a lay audience that is just worried about this whole world of horrible things that's happening out there, you know, climate change, we have new activities, there could be a spill, there could be, you know, we're about the right whales. How do we distill that in a way that will actually resonate with people once we've done that analysis at the appropriate scale? So what are the sort of thing about other vehicles to help us educate the folks that are impacted by this decision and the folks that are making those decisions? Because we don't always know the background of those decision makers. They could be, you know, they could be an environmental lawyer, they could be a scientist, they could not be any of those things, they could be an economist, they could be, you know, they have to look at all of these factors if they don't necessarily have a background and they can't have a background in all those things. So that's something that I've been thinking about as we've been talking about this morning. Thanks, Brad. I think that's a really interesting point. And I hadn't really thought about bringing in the communication aspect of that. But I think that that is, you know, we did also talk about communication at one of our earlier meetings. And I think, you know, this could be an interesting application of some of that. Brad? Yes, I have sort of the same comment as Scott, and that sort of, you know, where do you need the most help, particularly as it relates to cumulative impacts and the human dimensions. And it's not just the agency, but also the subject matter experts. So we would, I think, hope that the workshop would be most, would be directly helpful for subject matter experts in their jobs, day to day jobs. And so that's another way perhaps to think about how we might structure this. How is it directly helpful? How what could we do? And how could this workshop help with the day to day work that you've got to do as subject matter experts? And then I mean, I don't want to throw it off into another direction, but there could be other ways, you know, that this question might be addressed. We did think about, you know, individual discussions with TOSA members. There's the options of perhaps having a National Academy studies. So I mean, I don't want to take us off in that direction. I want to keep us on the workshop. But if, if percolating in the backs of your mind, there may be other things that we could do as well. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up, Rod. It's a very good point. And I'll just note that the concept of a workshop or, you know, sort of an expanded meeting of TOSA came out of that last meeting, but it's, we aren't limited to that if there are other ways in which folks think that this topic would be better handled. Certainly, we welcome feedback on that as well. So we can always pivot and try to think about, you know, making content for BOM in a way that is most digestible and useful for them. If a workshop is not something that you think would cover this topic well, we can consider a different forum or format. That, were you going to say something? Okay, Rodney? Yeah, I just had a quick question for you, I think. Has the National Academy of Sciences ever done a cumulative effects report just on social science and aspects, you know, or effects from energy, mining, anything like that? Again, I mentioned the report in the Arctic, but that was broader than just social science. So I don't know, has that ever ever been done? Thanks, Rodney. I can't, I will admit I should do a little more background research on that from the Ocean Studies Board perspective in the last 18 years. I don't think that we have done any study like that. It's possible one of our sister boards within the division has done a similar study looking at terrestrial systems or impacts from terrestrially managed resources, but I cannot think of anything like that. And I got pinged quickly from Deb Glickson who's on the line as well, who can't think of any similar ones either. So not that I'm not that I'm immediately aware of. You know, when the terrestrial would be helpful as well, I guess. So yeah. Thank you. Kerry less and then Scott. Yeah, and Rodney, I was going exactly the same place. And so I've been poking around online while listening to see what I could find. And at least there's nothing that jumps out at me. I did a search on national academies and cumulative impacts. And the only thing that came up was the process to understand the cumulative effects of anthropogenic blah, blah, blah on marine mammals. So we have a series of reports on noise and whales, including some cumulative impact analysis there, but more broadly and focused on the human environment. I can't think of any lesson and Scott. Yeah, well, I think that I think the terminology just varies. There is now a field called coupled human natural systems and SF has a granting program in it. It's a big field. It exploded with the origin of the concept of ecosystem services, but it's largely lacking in theoretical rigor. And I really think that whatever we want to call it in serving bone, a more focused action oriented study of cumulative impacts in the context of general system dynamics would be a gift to the world. It would certainly be a gift to the nation. And I think it would give bone something it badly needs. Was that clear? I think I followed. I will know it's maybe tangentially related, but we did have a study of 2012-2013 that looked at an ecosystem-based ecosystem services approach to assessing the damage from the deep water horizon spill. And I don't think that that in and of itself is an appropriate study in total, but I do think there may be portions of that study. And I'd have to go back and look at it again. It's at least a decade old now, but I'd have to go back and look and really remember if there are some nuggets in there that could be drawn from that study. Scott, Kevin, and then Les. A couple ideas come to mind about other resources to think about. One Kevin brought up earlier today sent the preliminary draft of the EPA document on an overview, which I haven't had a chance to read yet, but on cumulative impacts analysis, assessment and analysis. And they may well have some folks who could be very beneficial to this whole whole process. They may be worth, maybe I'm always looking for opportunities for us to convene something that brings in other agencies so we can share best practices between agencies. But that one comes to mind. Oh, senior moment now. I've forgotten what the other one was. If I remember it out before over, I'll bring it back. I'm going to turn 70 next week. So I'm getting a little fuzzy here. Forgive me. Well, we'll certainly come back to you. And again, we're kind of doing a little bit of digging here on our end. I will know we've had a couple of things on sort of the couple natural human system approach to things. But again, we'd have to mind those to see if they really get into some of the same issues that we're talking about here. And Stacey and Mike, I would ask Greg Sims, when I was on the Dells Committee, it was around 2012. We had a big meeting about cumulative effects and the study. And I'm not sure if it ever happened that Greg would remember that. And maybe some things did. I just remembered. I was going to make a pitch to reengage with Robert Windsor. We had on the panel today from BLM because they're probably an agency that is most like Boom, except for they cover the onshore. But they have a whole range of resources that they have to manage. They manage federal lands. They manage interactions with states and tribes. I mean, they've got a lot of the same challenges you all have. And I got the impression that he had quite a bit of useful perspectives on this topic that might be worth exploring more deeply. So he may also have some ideas about other people that would be worth contacting and bringing in. Senior moment passed. Not senior yet. Kevin, Les, and then Carrie. Yeah, I just, and maybe it's from the first in class when we invited a bunch of different agencies in a way. But if that's the kind of workshop, there is a fair bit of work in Europe done on cumulative impacts, particularly on wind farms like Edward Willstead and that group out of CFAS have got a series of papers on cumulative impacts. And I noticed that the upcoming September meeting for ICES, they are having a session on ecosystem science needs to support a new era of offshore wind and renewable energy. So it might be that we can, by just being in tune with some of these different ones, we can combine and get a little further rather than repeating the wheel or something. Thank you very much, Kevin. Les, and then Carrie. Yeah, I don't know how many are aware, but there is an international society of ecological economics. And this is kind of what we talk about all the time. Unfortunately, we mostly talk, but there, we should look at the list of participants and experts there. I think that will be helpful. The other thing I just wanted to mention is that among the people trying to operationalize this, about 10 years ago, several of us got together with funding from the Moore Foundation to see how we were doing it the same or differently. And there was Nat Cap, My Team Mimes, Ares is another one, and then the Brent School in California. So maybe a part of the workshop could be devoted to operationalization. Like, how do you actually do it? And this goes back to some of the stuff that Rodney was talking about. And those people are still around. Gretchen Daly at Stanford would be like a prime one. Thank you, Les. Yeah, I put my hand down. I put it back up. And I guess I was thinking, I think it, and maybe this has already been conveyed, apologies if it's redundant. But I'm thinking, I'm thinking of the different missions of the different agencies and other entities that deal with cumulative impacts or cumulative impact assessment, NEPA work, and so on. And so I wonder if appreciating the very particular mission of bone, if a cumulative impact workshop and me as a no-brainer would include drawing on those other particularly federal entities and their work in this arena, but also a concerted effort to understand where there is overlap or commonality in terms of the particular needs and interests and where there may be differences to be able to appreciate that a cumulative impact assessment effort or a cumulative impacts approach used in one agency is not going to necessarily be a perfect fit for somebody else, but like sort of avoiding throwing the baby out with bathwater kind of thing and appreciating that the baby's worth keeping. So anyway, thanks. Terrible metaphor. Thanks, Sarah. Jessica? Brian Jordan had to hop a little early for a different meeting. So I asked him if there was anything that he wanted to suggest because he's such a good thinker in this space. And one of the things that he brought up is that we're so used to thinking at bone, either project by project or maybe cumulatively better across a particular program. And one of the things that bone has never done is the cumulative impact of a particular region across all of our programs combined. So if you were taking one instance of this in the Gulf of Mexico, there's multiple programs. And that gets up this bigger question that bones trying to wrap our heads around right now is what is this energy transition look like? And I think that's one thing that we could think about as well. I just wanted to point that out. I think that's fascinating. I think the look across programs would definitely be an interesting approach. Les, you're muted. You missed the best part. I just wanted to second that. I think it's really important to have a safe space to talk about energy transition and other transitions like that because on a day to day basis, it's sometimes awkward to do so. There are many people invested in oil and fossil fuels who are really concerned about this. It's a sensitive topic because we don't know what all these people will do when that goes away. So having COSA encompass that could be really useful. Thank you, Les. Scott? I would like, Jessica, I thought that was a great suggestion. And Les, I think it was a great build. I think this is an important topic and one worth considering for BOEM. I mean, you are in the middle of so many. You got your feet in all aspects of the energy transition, or you will very shortly, depending on when you get your CC U.S. stuff out. I'm kind of waiting for that. But assuming you do, you cover a huge amount of waterfront. And the tradeoffs are going to be key. And I used to work for a company that was one of the first shell, the first to use scenario analysis to help chart their future and plan kind of long-term. And we found that to be a very, very helpful thing to do, especially if you're looking out 20 years, 30 years. It's not so great for next year, but that's not what it's for. But maybe there's an opportunity for some scenario planning workshops around the transition as it particularly would impact BOEM that could be helpful. I think that's something I think I would echo Les' suggestion on that one. Yeah, I like that it combines that predictive scenario forecasting aspects and really that connection to the human environment. I mean, this could change huge ways of the way that our economy is shaped and the way that communities are structured and things like that tourism. I mean, just so many different aspects of the human environment. I assume everyone's aware we have a proposed notice of Lee sale for offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico now, which is moving forward along with Lee sales for oil and gas. So there is an interaction that we're looking to. Well, and if you have CCUS, the Gulf is one of the two major opportunity areas for CCUS in the offshore. And so you'd have to deal with three separate programs and don't forget minerals out there too, all in one place. So it's very interesting scenarios to contemplate. Yeah, and we'll certainly be doing a at some point in environmental impact statement at the Gulf carbon sequestration too. So a good point and working on regs as you all know. Just think fascinating and I'm just kind of thrilled that you raise that as well. I think that you know certainly sparked some additional thought and consideration. Barry? Yeah, and I'm actually responding to Rod's comments in that what an energy transition looks like is also a historical question. I agree. And I think I was interested. I raised the question at the beginning of our session about how we're how we're actually how folks variously define cumulative impacts and cumulative impact assessment and the like. And one of the things that is certainly an NEPA definition and I think of as being part of it is the historical context. So we can only understand the present by having some awareness I think of history variously considered. So anyway, just hoping that in thinking about cumulative impacts and the like, folks are also thinking about the past that got us here. And there's a lot to be learned from that. It doesn't mean that we do things exactly as we've done them in the past, heaven knows there are all kinds of issues with that. But really just don't forget history. Thanks. And I think that was a very good point that Rod put into the chat and I appreciate you elevating it to the discussion as well. Rodney? Yeah, I was just I'm terrible at multitasking, but I was trying anyway. Ash, many years ago I was a member of the IAA International Association for Impact Assessment. It's the international group that works on impact assessment and a big thing that they're really focused on is social impact assessment. And again, this is an international group. And the meetings that I have gone to, you know, it's been many years ago, you know, there has been a focus in different parts of the world on kind of, you know, energy transitions, the human environment. So I'm just kind of curious now. I'm wondering, you know, what all progressed over the years since I haven't been involved anymore. So I tried to look it up, but it was copyrighted. But I found an impact assessment and project appraisal ecosystem services, cumulative effects and sustainability. So something like that, I can't get to it because it's copyrighted. But something like that looking at that international aspect kind of building on what Brian Jordan and Jessica said, the national aspect, I think would be important because I mean, who knows what's transpired and kind of the international sphere now. Thanks for drawing our attention to that, Rodney. I think that could be an excellent resource for us. Sorry, Rod, I didn't quite see, I missed what was in, you just put something in the chat and then ask if you want to say it out loud. I was just going to point out that, you know, the second World War, sort of the growth of plastics and petrochemicals and plastics and big transitions in society. So anyway, they're both historical. Interrogating the past for these questions, these public policy questions is very fruitful, something that we do. 350 and I welcome any additional dialogue. I'll look to Scott and Rod a bit to see if they feel we need to delve into any of the specific aspects of the workshop planning that I've outlined any deeper or if we feel like maybe we've got enough to inspire some further discussion, maybe with Jessica and others about planning something, perhaps for the fall. There has been some great meat to chew on along the way in this discussion. So really appreciate all that. Rod, you've put your hands up. Oh, you're muted, Rod. I guess I'd just like to make sure that the folks at Burn think that the workshop is a good idea, is the way to go forward. Do they want us to think about other formats, other ideas, different kinds of proposals? If there's broad agreement, then that's super and we can go ahead. We can move forward. I think it's a great question and I would echo it. Definitely don't want to be putting on meetings for folks, but they're not interested in getting anything out of. And then further, like we said earlier, if there are other forums or formats through which you think. So I actually want to ask Jessica and Rod Nate to respond to that question. I want to ask you, Bill. I could say you were waiting. Go ahead. I'm there for you. Jessica, do you want to go first? Sure. I would say that given that it's four o'clock on a Friday, we've had a number of folks drop off. But I will say that it seemed like there was a bit of energy around some of these topics and kind of how you merge them together. I suspect a workshop, as the agenda starts coming together, would be a great forum and would be really of interest to a number of parts of Bomes Environmental and Economics programs as well. And so I think it's something at least worth pursuing. But I do note, you know, Stacey, you had said not long ago, we would need to begin planning this sooner than later to make sure that we have the rate kind of, you know, read ahead materials. We have the rate guests. We have the rate format and things like that. And so I would be certainly interested in, you know, being part of a kind of a planning group between National Academies, COSA and BOME to make sure that we would land it in a good spot. I think there's so much fodder and some of these topics that we've been discussing. And, you know, nobody's, you know, nobody has the silver bullet. So, you know, let's talk about best practices. Let's talk about what the future looks like, being informed by the past rod and whatnot. So I'm enthusiastic about it, but we definitely need to continue conversations within BOME to make sure that there's still utility. And I definitely think, you know, we need advice in this area. And we need to improve. And, you know, I think there is excitement around it. I want to improve. I guess I'm just struggling with, okay, is the best next step, a workshop? Or is it some type of white paper and then a workshop? Or is it some type of, you know, smaller planning group first that could kind of delve into, you know, what are some of the key questions, best practices, doing some, you know, research with, you know, through other agencies, terrestrial work, international, like I mentioned through the IAIA or maybe other areas. So I guess I'm just thinking about the, you know, what would be most helpful, you know, with regard to, you know, which comes first, do we want to do a workshop and then kind of follow up with the kind of best practices or maybe a best practices document, and then have that as a guide for the workshop to actually kind of, you know, pick out, you know, where we can engage best. So I think I'm just, you know, the concept all in, it's just kind of the order to get there or the how to get there is what I'm thinking about. I don't know if there's any more thoughts on that. I'll note, Rodney, please correct my wording if I'm wrong, Stacy, but the standing committee does have limitations on what types of products it's allowed to produce. And so we probably would need to go through a different contract via call if we were going to be producing any of those white papers or other documents. Well, of course we would, yes. Yeah, so how about, I think it's a really important issue and it may warrant a workshop, but from, I think from what I'm hearing, I would suggest that Jessica and Rodney and Jill and Wendalski and, you know, and then on the Academy side, Stacy, you know, sink through this a little bit more and come back with a recommendation to the Academy. Yeah, I certainly think we can come up with that. And Jessica, you really hit the nail on the head in terms of we are limited in what our deliverables can be as a standing committee. It is feasible to reconstitute the Academy through a separate contractual mechanism to do other types of work. So they are not inherently limited from ever, you know, producing something as a committee. It would just have to be that they were reconstituted for that purpose. And I'll note that that also requires, of course, each of our committee members to sign on to that. So, you know, that's just something else to consider. But the other thing that we can, of course, do too is help be at the Ocean Studies Board or Beezer or some collection of boards at the Academy think through, whether it be a study or some other written deliverable that might not be necessarily conducted by this exact committee, but, you know, could have some sort of carryover or overlap. Brad and then Scott. Yeah, this is real good. I'm sure Jessica is already thinking about this. But I think, unfortunately, just with the timing of this and some other things going on and some fire drills, a lot of our actual like, you know, NEPA practitioners and folks who actually have to sort of implement this kind of stuff weren't able to be with us and participate as much as they would have liked. And we've had some people out and sick and stuff. You know, so I really, I think it's all well and good for folks like me and Rodney and folks to talk about this, but I don't actually have to do the work. Right. So, you know, I really think that we would need, I'd want us to go back and really engage with our staff who are going to have to actually do the work, take whatever comes out of this and implement that to say, all right, this is what it will actually be helpful to us. And I know Jessica has already got that group put together to go back and I know that they were supportive of a workshop. But I do want to sort of make sure that we're incorporating those voices because at the end of the day, if they can't take what comes out of this and use it effectively or if what comes out of it isn't something that can actually be, you know, put into use because of, you know, all the different legislations and all the other things that we have to do. So I just want to make sure that what we do is actually serving our staff that need to do the work because they are our most important resource and they're the ones that we need to be giving something good and useful to. So. I saw Rod nodding. I saw Scott nodding. Certainly I am in complete agreement with that, Brad. At the end of the day, POSA always endeavors to serve BOME and to help in your day to day, you know, in the day to day work of the BOME subject matter experts. And so if we're not achieving that then it really is not a useful use of our time. So thought and then Kevin. Scott, you're on mute. Since we're coming to the end, I want to thank everybody for their participation. This is a very, I think a really productive meeting and we got a lot of stuff covered. I really again want to thank our speakers this morning and Stacy, I hope we're going to get all our presentations available to us. I think there was some really valuable material there. On the topic of this workshop would be good for BOME to talk among themselves about is that the key item you'd like to have from us in the fall? I am mindful of the and I think it's an important topic. If we do tackle it, I hope we can have at least have two days worth of sessions so that we can have another day for something else because I think there's a lot of other parts of your program that we have not been hearing much about that we deferred off the marine minerals program discussion for this session. I think there's we really have not had a deep dive into what they've been doing and you've got some expertise on the committee now that's going to be very helpful for you in that. I of course am still interested in hearing about carbon capture and sequestration. I'm sure it's on your agenda since it's now five months behind schedule of rolling out the new regs and you know I care about the totality of your programs. We're the government, we're always late, it's okay. Yeah, you guys don't seem to have the same motto as BLM which is get it done. So maybe there's a learning for there, I don't know. We're shooting for get it done right. Yeah, okay, well there you go. Okay, oh good good good come back but no I really I do I do want to make sure we have some have some discussion potentially have can cover some of the other areas of the program that are relevant too because I think it's important that we're getting four or five new members and I think we want to make sure we are seeing more than just kind of we've been really focused on the social sciences which is important but I think we want to make sure and and more on on wind we want to make sure that we touch on some of the other parts of the program as well this that's all I had to say. Thanks Scott, I'll turn to Kevin. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, definitely a great session. My question is kind of relevant to what Brad or there's a follow-up on a comment Brad just made. Do you guys, does Bohm think that the workshop would be is it more useful to talk about modeling and data collection and analysis and cumulative effect or is it more important to focus on understanding of cumulative effect and say the understanding of different actions and developments that Bohm's doing and how you know for your staff that you were talking about there Brad is it yeah is it a to get a scope of how you know a particular Bohm decision or action has a cumulative effect on the human resource or is it more of a kind of almost like a modeling analysis like you know some of the some of the scientists were talking about earlier on the on the ecosystem approach. Yeah, I mean I think unfortunately that's one of those questions where the answer is probably both right. Yeah, so so but I think I don't know I'm just sort of approaching that question as a manager and I would like to provide my staff with as much resources and support as they could as they can have to do their job right I think that's sort of what I'm supposed to do. So I would I would not be upset if it focused on that that direct support to the folks doing the day-to-day work I would think that and you know again to them to the multi-day thing I think going back to the conversation about you know if some of the workshop could focus on some of that conversation about the communication piece right so we we need to make sure the folks have what they need to do the job up front but then they end they at the end of the day hand that off to folks like Rodney and Bill who then have to relay those messages to managers and the people who are actually making decisions higher up in the department or in the bureau and so I think it's both but I think if we do I don't think we would be hurt by focusing up front on giving the folks what they need day to day to make sure that their analysis and their work is as high quality and as good as it can be and then you know if we have to put more effort in on our end to figure out how to how to sell those things package them so that they're understandable the folks have to make those decisions then then that's okay I'm okay with giving me more work I don't want to give my folks more work. Yeah that's what I'd say is let's let the group that's going to think through it think about the agenda as well as whether to do it. Thanks Brad thanks Bill yeah I think probably thinking in terms of next steps it would make sense maybe for Jessica and Brad and others at BOME to to confer with your colleagues to get a sense you know especially from the folks that didn't have an opportunity to be on the call today you know what key elements they'd like to get out of this as well and how they see that being best conveyed whether that's in a workshop or through another mechanism and if it is a workshop if they have any specific thoughts on the elements that we've outlined and then happy to convene you know maybe a small planning group between BOME staff and national academy staff and COSA leadership and we can get this underway you know we had tentatively talked about this being a fall event maybe there's another time when it would plug in better if there especially if there's any pressing issues that BOME wants to cover in the fall so highlighting some of those other elements that Scott mentioned of BOME's portfolio that we have maybe haven't touched on as much or that are you know quickly emerging and evolving so just throwing that out to BOME as well would ask you you know again spend some time with your colleagues getting a sense from them what they want and I would encourage their involvement too in you know any planning group that we develop so I'm very happy to chat with any of them. We are wrapping up a little bit early but I too just wanted to take a moment to thank everybody that's on the line and you know really to extend my gratitude to to the BOME participants to the new COSA members that that willingly joined us prior to their first official meeting and to anybody else on the line as well I think you know we've we have a lot of conversing left to do on these topics and I think there's still you know this I think was just the beginning of what could be some really fascinating conversations between between BOME and COSA and I know we've said that a few times but the social sciences in particular we recognize are a a whole swath of sciences and of issues that we haven't really delved into before so we see this as sort of the beginning of those conversations and far from the end. I want to give Scott and Rod both an opportunity to provide any summarizing or final thoughts as well and then for the COSA members on the line we are scheduled to have a very short closed session tonight I think that we had that running from 4.30 to 5. If we're able to I'm happy to start that a little bit early so if we hop off here say five four fifteen start that maybe right away and then just wrap it up quickly if folks are amenable to that. Scott, Rod any final thoughts from each of you? Well I just want to thank all of all of our BOME colleagues for participating in this and our special guests this morning I thought they were very good productive sessions I really want to also recognize the everybody involved in pulling together the agenda this morning on such short notice but I think we got a great panel of experts and there was a lot of great material shared there so hopefully we will find a way to follow up on today's this afternoon session and find a vehicle that is useful to the BOME staff because at the end of the day that's who we care about we want you guys to be successful in what you do and we want to make sure whatever we do is helpful to you so we look forward to hearing your thoughts about how best to build on this afternoon session to plan some sort of next steps relative to you know this topic this afternoon so thanks Scott thanks again. Yeah I'll just echo all of those sentiments and thank you to the experts this morning to the to the national academies folks to BOME leadership and also to the BOME social scientists that we pinged on quite heavily not only for this meeting but for the one back in November they were very generous with their time and their input and we really really appreciated it I think it's a it is a good idea to reflect on sit back and take a it's a little while to reflect on what we talked about today and what the best routes forward might be and I think that obviously the other topics for the COSA to discuss I do want social sciences to stay in the mix I don't just want this to be a one and done and we're so whenever we do come back to it whether it's next time or I mean in the fall or whatever that might be I think that would be great I don't I want us to keep the social sciences in and amongst the things that we talk about actively going forward and doesn't have to be in the fall but I think it would be good for it to be at some point so thank you very much everybody thank you each we will go ahead and adjourn the open session and COSA members we will reconvene in closed session at 415 on a separate link thank you all again thanks to the BOME staff look forward to to being in touch with each of you soon johnny think you just send that link out again thanks he's uh Scott yes that is Mark yeah and I'll check with him and I'll uh I'll get your email address from either Stacy or somebody else and I'll respond tonight