OCTOBER 2021 NEWS

Dear ROSA Community,

September marked the one-year anniversary of the establishment of ROSA’s Advisory Council – it is hard to believe that a year has passed since we launched our work together! ROSA staff take their lead from the Council, which provides substantive direction and strategic guidance for the organization. We have accomplished a lot over the past year, from publishing the monitoring framework and guidelines to hiring a contractor to work on data standardization and sharing, to advancing work on a regional research framework, gear standardization, and incorporating fishermen’s ecological knowledge into research. You can read the details of our work together in the following section. Thank you to all on the Advisory Council, and in our broader community, who have contributed to a number of critical projects this year!

Other updates follow, including details on how to participate in the next Advisory Council meeting.

Advancing Progress on Advisory Council Priorities

The Advisory Council has met five times in the past year, with the first few meetings focused on setting priorities and subsequent meetings providing a forum for deeper discussion of these priorities. At the November 2020 meeting, the Advisory Council determined that ROSA should concentrate its efforts on supporting baseline data collection and baseline data needs for fishing. Other projects that the Advisory Council stated should take precedence were: monitoring guidance; long-term research plan; data management, storage, and access; and socioeconomic research framing.

The March 2021 meeting focused on outlining specific projects related to baseline needs that ROSA could undertake. After the meeting, ROSA polled its community to further refine key priorities, and the results defined the following project priorities:

• Data aggregation
• Regional scale learning objectives
• Gear standardization
• Fishermen ecological knowledge

The following chart chronicles the broad range of work that ROSA and the Advisory Council have undertaken over the past year on these key projects. More detail can be found in the presentation for the September 2021 Advisory Council meeting.

ROSA Leadership on Advisory Council Priorities

Work Plans in Development

To facilitate continued progress on ROSA’s work with the Advisory Council, Mike Pol and I are developing work plans on the projects in the above chart. The plans will outline key goals for each project, scope of work, milestones for completing phases of work, and how ROSA will work together with Advisory Council subcommittees and Research Advisors. The plans will be completed and shared with the Advisory Council later this fall. If you are interested in participating in any of the subcommittees related to these projects, please reach out to me at [email protected] or Mike at [email protected].

Next Advisory Council Meeting Set for December 20th

The next Advisory Council meeting, which is open to the public, will be held on December 20th from 1 to 4 pm EST. You can review the presentations from the last meeting on our website’s Advisory Council page. We hope you will join us!

Collaborating on National Science Foundation Grant

ROSA is working with Rutgers’ University and other partners on a recently awarded National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator grant for the project, “Regional climate change projections to enable equitable ocean planning for the blue economy.” The main focus of the project, which will be completed by September 2022, is to collaboratively design web tools that empower community members to integrate climate information into their decision-making, and make projections of climate impacts actionable and useful for the ocean economy in the Northeast U.S. ROSA staff will help facilitate the incorporation of recommendations from members of ROSA governance bodies throughout the collaborative design process.

Rutgers is the lead institution and collaborators include University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts, The Nature Conservancy, ROSA, University of Wisconsin, Rutgers Educational Opportunity Fund, the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

ROSA Staff to Present at AFS Meeting Symposium

Mike and I will have a table in the exhibitor’s hall and be leading a symposium with others titled “Interactions Between Offshore Wind, Fisheries, and Fisheries Resources” on November 8th and 9th at the Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society(AFS). My presentation, titled "Responsible Offshore Science Alliance (ROSA): Advancing coordinated regional research and monitoring for offshore wind and fisheries," will take place at 8 am EST on November 8th and Mike's, titled "Considerations for Gear Standardization for Research and Monitoring in Offshore Lease Areas,” is scheduled for 8:40 am EST on November 9th. If you are attending the meeting, please join us for these sessions and stop by our table in the exhibitor’s hall. We would love to see you!

Please reach out if you have any feedback on the work we are doing with the Advisory Council, guidance on any of the projects we are undertaking, or suggestions for others who might want to be involved in ROSA’s work. I always appreciate hearing from you.

Best Regards,

Lyndie Hice-Dunton, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ROSA

[email protected]