Ken Sherman (r) receives an award in 1997 for his work on Large Marine Ecosystems from Zygmut Polanski, Director of the Sea Fisheries Institute in Gdynia, Poland.
Kenneth Sherman,
Director
National Marine Fisheries Service, Narragansett Laboratory
We often studied together until the small hours of the night, preparing for grueling taxonomy exams from Don Zinn, fishery populations models from Saul Saila, geomorphological constructs from Bob McMaster, and tidal calculations required in physical oceanography from Stacey Hicks.
My attention was captured by Dave Pratt and his enthusiasm for plankton and the findings of Bigelow, Fish, Redfield, Ketchum, and Riley in the Western North Atlantic; and Fraser, Hardy, Lucas, Lebour, Braarud, and Glover for the Northeast Atlantic. Those were heady times for a graduate student, with guest lectures from Lionel Walford, Roger Revelle, and Athelstan Spillhaus.
We five were carried along by the explosion of activity in government, academia, and the private sector during the enormous expansion in ocean studies of the early 1960s. I fared very well with a position as a fishery research biologist in the Honolulu laboratory of NMFS, studying the relationships between seasonal variability in the movements of water masses around the Hawaiian Islands, changes in zooplankton bioindicators of water masses, and the availability and abundance of skipjack tuna to the Hawaiian fishery. After three years in Hawaii, my family and I moved to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, where I worked for the next 10 years at the NMFS laboratory. I studied the relationships between seasonal and annual changes in coastal plankton and coastal ocean conditions in the Gulf of Maine in an effort to improve forecasts of availability and abundance of Atlantic herring to the Maine "sardine" fisheries.
In 1970, with the creation of NOAA by executive order of President Nixon, I embarked on a career path that combined research and long-term multidisciplinary planning at the national level. I was among the lucky handful of NMFS field staff called to Washington to plan the integration of NMFS research into the larger entity known as NOAA. We worked with the first NOAA Administrator, Bob White, and learned about systems engineering, event logic diagrams, and program development plans from NASA staff. That was a challenging time, preparing NMFS with plans and budget requests to integrate individual laboratory operations around the country into a network of laboratories organized into the Fishery Science Centers of today. Following two years in Washington, we organized a Marine Resources Monitoring and Assessment Program (MARMAP) office at the NMFS Narragansett Laboratory and conducted studies of the Northeast Shelf from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras.
In 1975, after the U.S. Fishery Conservation Zone was established and foreign trawlers were expelled, the assessment of the fish species on the Northeast Shelf was expanded into a full-scale, multidisciplinary ecosystems study. These studies were the basis of the concept that large expanses of coastal ocean areas could be distinguished on the basis of four ecological criteria: productivity, bathymetry, hydrography, and trophic relationships.
With assistance from GSO Dean and subsequent Administrator of NOAA, John Knauss, we organized a series of symposia from 1964 through 1996 focusing on the Large Marine Ecosystem (LME) as an ecological unit for global assessment and management. The LME concept is being adopted by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and NOAA as a useful construct for marine resources assessment and management. LME projects supported by GEF are underway in 25 coastal countries.
