NRT: Sustainable Oceans: From Policy to Science to Decisions

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Oceans span over 70% of the Earth and play critical roles in almost all facets of human well-being, including regulating climate, biodiversity, and feeding the world's growing population. A grand challenge for society is to improve the scientific understanding of natural and human impacts on marine ecosystems to ensure that the oceans continue to provide for generations to come. To overcome this challenge, a segment of our nation's workforce must address an unmet and growing demand for hypothesis-driven research to inform the decisions of federal and state resource management agencies. This National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of California, Davis will train the next generation of marine scientists under a new paradigm that puts the policy focus on the front-end of the research and training enterprise as a means of building more effective links between the science and decisions on sustainable use of living marine resources. The project anticipates training 60 PhD students, including 30 funded trainees, from ecology, conservation biology, economics, geology, physiology, biogeochemistry, and oceanography. There is growing appreciation that the disconnect between the scientific and policy communities is due to the scientific research questions not aligning with the information that policymakers need to make informed decisions, and to the researchers rarely having the wide-angle lens necessary to understand how their disciplinary research integrates with other science to address policy questions. The basis for the training program's paradigm is a novel causal chain model that extends from a policy goal to the different types of scientific information needed to measure the impacts of management decisions. The practice of working through a causal chain, coupled with fieldtrips to stakeholders, basecamps (week-long workshops with decision-makers and stakeholders organized around marine management issues), internships, short-term visiting scientists, research symposium, data-model integration training, and immersion in marine science and policy will provide trainees with a deeper understanding of how their own STEM research, founded in the primary perspective of a single discipline, fits into a policy process. Trainees will be recruited from a diversity of populations, with special attention to students from natural resource-dependent communities (e.g., tribal nations in Northern California, rural and remote coastal towns). Recruitment, mentoring, and professional development skills are woven throughout all of the elements of the training program, including research partnerships with tribal nations and direct engagement with resource-dependent communities via the fieldtrips and basecamps. Elements of the training program are also open to California State University (CSU) masters students through our novel Scholars Program in partnership with CSU's Council on Ocean Affairs and Technology (COAST) program. The NRT program will help shape the future curriculum of a new Marine Science PhD program at UC Davis.The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new potentially transformative models for STEM graduate education training. The Traineeship Track is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary research areas, through comprehensive traineeship models that are innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.