Volume 23, Issue 2, 1998 July/August 1998

Research Fleet Needs to Prepare for Future

The International Joint Commission is helping to seek funds for workshops on research vessel coordination. According to the Commission's Council of Great Lakes Research Managers, such coordination would be a major step towards improving the effectiveness of Great Lakes research. The science and operational aspects of Great Lakes research vessels has largely been determined by the individual agencies, universities and institutes involved with Great Lakes research. The challenge is to match the capabilities of vessels with the requirements of the science programs.

To begin this task, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory compiled a research vessel inventory that currently includes 62 vessels on the Great Lakes. Half of these ships are devoted to fisheries research and the rest to general research and education. The mean age of these boats is 27 years with the oldest being the 60 year-old Barney Devine (Wisconsin DNR) and the newest being the two year-old W.G. Jackson (Grand Valley State University). The mean length of these vessels is 50 feet. In general, these vessels are not as large or well equipped as the coastal marine research fleet, yet the conditions under which they must work are often more extreme. The winters on the lakes are particularly harsh and, as a consequence, very little information is gathered between the months of November and April.

A clear preliminary finding is that the current fleet available to the Great Lakes research community is not adequate to support the science needs of the future. An assessment of the "state of the fleet" and its ability to support science is overdue. One outcome would be a series of recommendations concerning the decommissioning of older, less efficient boats and the acquisition of newer, multi-capability research vessels. This assessment is the first step in developing a blueprint for a modern research vessel fleet in the Great Lakes that will fulfill the needs for state-of-the-art research capabilities.

To view the inventory of Great Lakes research vessels, visit www.ijc.org/rel/boards/cglr/rv on the World Wide Web.