The sun is starting to emerge in western Oregon, and that makes this the perfect time to have a workshop on inter-sector communication…Right? Well that’s what those of us on the INACaMMP project team believe anyhow. It has been in the making for more than a year, and now the workshop is less than 2 weeks away! With the intended goals of coordinating and opening lines of communication to initiate iterative research project development between decision makers and scientists, we will be conducting a series of interactive activities during this 1 day session.

While the workshop has been designed around research results from initial phases of the INACaMMP project, there will also be ample opportunity for participants to discuss various issues most pressing to coastal and marine policy and management. In conducting this workshop, the project team aims to address decision makers’ needs to 1) Infuse research into their policy and management decisions and 2) Use this scientific data to communicate the reasoning behind their decisions with the public. We will also be working to fulfill scientists’ needs to 1) Demonstrate stakeholder and societal relevance in their research and 2) Translate basic research in a way that can be used in policy and management decisions. Finally, we will be addressing the national and state commitments to work with an Ecosystem Services framework in attempts to approach natural resource management in a more holistic manner.

By exploring a variety of interactive opportunities, we will investigate how to best design a workshop intended to generate applied and inter-sector research projects. I am very much looking forward to understanding participant feedback from the workshop and posting some of the findings to this blog. Most excitingly, I am anxious to see what projects and connections might begin at the workshop!