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TOWARD NEW PARTNERSHIPS IN OCEAN SCIENCES 25 



research within academia may depend on its forging productive 

 partnerships with NOAA. No simple description can usefully 

 encompass the range of partnerships between federal agencies and 

 the academic oceanography community. However, under the tra- 

 ditional arrangement, mission agencies (e.g., EPA) received rela- 

 tively little direct intellectual input from academic and private 

 scientists, and provided relatively little funding to academic insti- 

 tutions. Yet, although such agencies have relied on academic 

 scientists for much of the basic knowledge required to understand 

 policy questions, they have not assumed a serious responsibility 

 to advance that knowledge. These agencies, whose short-term 

 missions often require applied research, rely primarily on agency 

 scientists to carry out their missions with optimal short-term 

 efficiency. 



The traditional scientific partnerships that have existed over 

 the past 40 years are likely to change because the focus of ocean- 

 ography and the way it is carried out are changing. Increased 

 emphasis on the global scale and on multidisciplinary research, 

 the changing emphasis of naval oceanography, and increasingly 

 limited resources relative to an expanded capacity to conduct sci- 

 ence by using modern instrumentation and computing are all con- 

 tributing to change. These factors are pushing the field of ocean- 

 ography toward serious consideration of the greater efficiency that 

 could be achieved by a better coordinated national oceanography 

 effort. 



Our nation is faced with many pressing problems whose solu- 

 tions would benefit from increased cooperation between federal 

 agencies and nongovernmental scientists. Ocean research pro- 

 grams that developed from scientists' curiosity about nature have 

 a new social context and urgency. A salient example is global 

 change in all its aspects, including ocean circulation, air-sea transfer 

 of gases, response of organisms, sea-level rise, and other effects of 

 a potentially warming Earth. A balance should be maintained 

 between the complementary approaches of large programs and in- 

 dividual investigator science in order to preserve the diversity and 

 vigor of the field. Individual investigator science can be a fertile 

 source of innovative ideas, whereas large programs can garner the 

 resources for global-scale studies and can add momentum, collec- 

 tive wisdom, and resources for long-range planning. 



A major impetus for new partnerships in oceanography is the 

 realization that a global scale of study is now both possible and 

 desirable. The design and deployment of a global ocean observing 

 system, now being discussed, will be possible only with coopera- 



