Fourth CIMAR Symposium—Call for Participants

The CIMAR Symposium on “Climate and Communities” will be held on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, 8:00 a.m.-5:30 p.m., at the UH Manoa Campus Center Ballrooms (and ITS Webcast). The Symposium program committee welcomes contributions of work exploring the impact of climate change on any of the interdependent communities of living organisms in the tropical Pacific, ranging for example from deep sea food webs to coastal human societies, and including biological, chemical and physical impacts.

Poster sessions and a few oral presentations are being planned for the one-day event. Participants will be a mix of CIMAR researchers, NOAA federal staff, UH faculty, students, and management partners, in furtherance of cross-fertilization of ideas among these often-dissociated groups. Consequently, presentations that have already been prepared for other recent meetings are quite welcome, if relevant to the Symposium’s theme. Please email Doug Luther (dluther@hawaii.edu) a title and a few sentences describing what you would like to present by October 8, 2024. We expect to settle on a slate of posters and speakers by mid-October.

Some examples of topics that fit within the current broad Symposium theme (definitely not an exhaustive list) are as follows.
·     marine coastal ecosystems: coral reef diversity and impacts/resilience to environmental change (e.g., temperature increases; acidification); archipelagic food web impacts; etc.;
·     climate change impacts on fish: distribution; life history; food webs; abundance; fishery dynamics; etc.;
·     island coastal human communities: impacts and resilience to (i) changing marine resources (e.g., fish distribution and abundance, fishery economic and human dimensions), (ii) altered environments (e.g., changes in sea level; ocean circulation; rainfall; aquifers), etc.;
·     impacts on protected species: food availability; habitat loss as SL rises; and
·     leveraging advanced technologies to monitor and understand marine ecosystems in the Pacific, e.g., AI, machine learning, ROMS models, Structure from Motion, deep sea corals, biomechanics, etc.

The last CIMAR symposium was in 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic began. That symposium’s recorded talks and posters can be found online. The theme of that symposium was “New Technologies Driving Ocean Science Breakthroughs”.