Cooperative Science and Education Program

To support through grants and cooperative agreements, enduring partnerships between the Federal government and institutions of research and higher education for cooperative science and education on marine issues, especially living marine resources and their habitat, that confront local, regional, and
national resources managers; also, to award grants and cooperative agreements to develop innovative approaches and methods for marine and estuarine science and education.
Examples of Funded Projects

Alaska Center: JISAO at the University of Washington was supported to provide for the study of biological and physical factors affecting the recruitment of walleye pollock in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea to improve our ability to predict year class recruitment to the commercial fishery; to study the acoustic properties of fish of the north Pacific, develop visualization tools to increase the understanding of using sound to survey fish populations, investigate equipment and methods used to acoustically enumerate, size, and map fish distributions, and to foster the training of students and researchers in the use of acoustics to assess fish populations; and to provide for the study of food habitats of groundfish, the effects of fishing on the distribution of pollock in the Gulf of Alaska and the distributional behavior of Atka mackerel.

Research at CIFAR was conducted on the use of genetic markers to describe the population structure of Pacific Ocean Perch and to use genetics to study the possibility of two species of rougheye rockfish.<