!!! Nov 2008: ICED Science Plan and Implementation Strategy The ICED Science Plan and Implementation Strategy has been formally adopted and is now available to download. The ICED Science Plan and Implementation Strategy sets out an ambitious programme to address not only the significant scientific challenges of integrating Southern Ocean ecosystem, climate and biogeochemical research at a circumpolar level, but also the challenge of bringing together a multidisciplinary group of international scientists to ensure effective cooperation and communication in addressing the objectives of ICED. For more information contact ICED.

Integrating Climate and Ecosystem Dynamics in the Southern Ocean (ICED) is a multidisciplinary circumpolar ecosystem programme. Established by a group of polar scientists from around the world representing a wide range of research areas, ICED will facilitate the scientific coordination and communication required to undertake integrated circumpolar analyses of Southern Ocean ecosystems.

Over the next decade, ICED will address the need to increase our understanding of circumpolar ecosystem operation in the context of large–scale climate processes; local–scale ocean physics; biogeochemistry; food web dynamics; and harvesting.

ICED is being developed as a joint programme of IMBER and GLOBEC and is closely linked with EUR–OCEANS. The International Polar Year (IPY) is providing the catalyst to launch ICED in the shape of the ICED-IPY project, which will form the umbrella for a range of studies around the Antarctic during 2007-09.

ICED directly addresses the questions put forward as a science focus for IMBER such as:

1) How do climate processes affect the dynamics of circumpolar ecosystems?

2) How does ecosystem structure affect circumpolar ocean biogeochemical cycles?

3) How should ecosystem structure and dynamics be included in the development of sustainable approaches to managing exploitation?

The first ICED Science Planning Workshop was held 24-26 May 2005 at the British Antarctic Survey, involving 33 participants from 14 countries. A summary of the workshop was published in the April 2006 issue of the International GLOBEC Newsletter. An article on ICED’s involvement in the IPY was published in the March 2007 IMBER Newsletter.

For further details see: http://www.iced.ac.uk or contact iced@bas.ac.uk