CHARLES H. GREENE
Biological oceanography
Director, Ocean Resources and Ecosystems Program, Cornell University
Professor, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University
Visiting Investigator, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
2130 Snee Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-5449, chg2@cornell.edu
B A. 1978
Ph.D. 1985
University of Colorado
University of Washington
Research Interests
My primary goal as a scientist is to pursue my curiosity, while at the same
time addressing oceanographic problems of societal relevance. I attempt to be
innovative in developing both the problems I address as well as the
approaches by which I address them. My research interests range from the
ecological dynamics of marine animal populations to the effects of global
climate change on marine ecosystems. While I am a field-oriented
oceanographer, which has led me to focus much of my attention in the past on
the spatial scales we are capable of studying from ships, I also take great
satisfaction in scaling up our results through collaborative modeling, remotesensing, and synthesis projects with other scientists. Over the past 12 years,
the US GLOBal ocean ECosystems (GLOBEC) Northwest Atlantic/Georges
Bank Program has provided me with an opportunity to conduct some of the
most satisfying research that I have attempted during my career.
Our US GLOBEC research began in 1995 as an investigation of factors
regulating the dynamics of diapausing Calanus finmarchicus (Copepoda:
Calanoida) populations in the deep basins of the Gulf of Maine. Diapausing C.
finmarchicus copepodites in the Gulf of Maine seed the springtime population
that develops on Georges Bank. Secondary production during the spring on
Georges Bank is dominated by C. finmarchicus, and this production is critical
to the year-class success of larval and juvenile fishes, especially cod and
haddock. Thus, our overall goal has been to determine how oceanographic
processes occurring upstream affect the secondary production and fish
recruitment on Georges Bank.
During the field portion of the project, I served as chief scientist on five broadscale survey cruises to the Gulf of Maine. These survey cruises were
conducted during October 1997 and during October and December in both
1998 and 1999. Our surveys involved the use of a high-speed, deep-towed
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system, BIOMAPPER II (Bio-Optical Multiple-frequency Acoustic Platform
and Physical Environmental Remote-sensing system), configured with a
multiple-frequency acoustic system, a video plankton recorder, and several
physical and bio-optical sensors. BIOMAPPER II was on the drawing board
when our project began in 1995, and it is currently recognized as one of the
most sophisticated towed instruments in use by the civilian oceanographic
community. I am nearly as proud of our efforts to make and keep this
instrument operational during the five cruises (including some fairly nasty
hurricanes in October and December 1999) as I am in the success that we have
had in meeting our project’s scientific objectives.
Our final field season in the US GLOBEC Northwest Atlantic/Georges
Bank Program was completed in December 1999. We were fortunate to have
conducted our field research during one of the most dramatic climate-driven
events affecting the Northwest Atlantic during the 20th century. In the winter
of 1995/1996, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) Index exhibited its largest
drop of the century. This drop led to the most extensive intrusion of Labrador
Subarctic Slope Water (LSSW) into the Scotian Shelf/Gulf of Maine region
of the NW Atlantic since the 1960's. Canadian and US oceanographers were
able to track this subarctic slope water as it steadily advanced along the
Scotian Shelf break and replaced the deep basin waters of the western Scotian
Shelf and Gulf of Maine over the subsequent two years. By the late autumn of
1998, most of the warmer, more saline Atlantic Temperate Slope Water
(ATSW) in the deep basins of the Gulf of Maine had been replaced by the
cooler, fresher LSSW. Simultaneously, C. finmarchicus exhibited an
unprecedented decline in abundance in the Gulf of Maine, a response which
we attribute to the NAO-induced changes in ocean circulation that began two
years earlier. This response was short-lived, however. The 1996 drop in the
NAO Index was a single-year event, and the circulation patterns reverted back
rapidly to those characteristic of positive NAO conditions. By the autumn of
1999, most the LSSW that had recently entered the deep basins of the Gulf of
Maine was once again replaced by ATSW. Our zooplankton data from two
autumn cruises to the Gulf of Maine during 1999 indicated that the C.
finmarchicus population had recovered from the extremely low abundance
observed during 1998 to a level within the range of abundances observed
during the latter half of the 20th century.
The timing of our fieldwork in the US GLOBEC Program was
fortuitous and could not have been planned any better. We were able to
survey the physical and biological oceanographic conditions in the deep-basin
ecosystems before (1997), during (1998), and after (1999) the major
circulation effects from the 1995/1996 drop in the NAO manifested
themselves downstream in the Gulf of Maine. With the US GLOBEC
Program currently in its synthesis phase, my laboratory group is developing a
variety of models to interpret our own field data from the late 1990’s as well
as other physical and biological data sets extending back to the 1950’s.
Retrospective analyses of these longer time-series data have enabled us to
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explain our own field observations within the context of interdecadal-scale
climate variability. They have also led our research in new directions, such as
the conservation biology of the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale.
The relationship between our Gulf of Maine research and the NAO has opened
up new avenues for international collaboration. I organized a special
symposium and post-meeting workshop on, “The Response of Northeast and
Northwest Atlantic Shelf Ecosystems to Climate Variability and Change,” at
the June 2000 Meeting of the American Society of Limnology and
Oceanography (ASLO) in Copenhagen, Denmark. At the ASLO workshop,
we established a working group, Marine Ecosystem Responses to Climate In
the North Atlantic (MERCINA), to continue studying the effects of climate
variability and change on North Atlantic ecosystems. I continued developing
this basin-wide view of the NAO and its effects on marine ecosystems during
my sabbatical fellowship at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and
Synthesis in Santa Barbara, CA. Our working group’s ultimate goal is to
develop a predictive understanding of how shelf ecosystems around the world
respond to basin-scale forcings and regime shifts associated with natural and
anthropogenic-induced climate change. Five years ago, I organized another
special symposium and post-meeting workshop on this general topic at the
AGU/ASLO Ocean Sciences meeting held in Honolulu, Hawaii. The working
group was expanded at this meeting to include participants working on
common problems in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In 2005, NSF
awarded us a grant to continue this synthesis research through 2007.
While I anticipate that my research in the Northwest Atlantic will continue,
the focus of this research has shifted from field studies to retrospective
analyses of remote-sensing and time-series data. This shift has enabled me to
interpret the results of our field studies in the context of patterns developing
over inter-annual to inter-decadal time scales. I am of the opinion that the
combination of process-oriented field studies and retrospective analyses is
essential to achieving a predictive understanding of marine ecosystem
responses to climate change.
Since my research in the Northwest Atlantic has entered a phase
requiring less time at sea, I have initiated new field projects that will create
many new and exciting opportunities for studying the ecological dynamics of
pelagic animal populations. With colleagues from a number of institutions on
the mainland and Hawaii, I have been involved in the development of
undersea listening arrays in the Pacific Northwest and the Hawaiian
Archipelago. It is intended that these listening arrays will be used to track
acoustically tagged and/or vocalizing pelagic animals over relatively large
geographic expanses of the ocean.
In the Pacific Northwest, I spent much of 2006 working as a senior
scientist with the Census of Marine Life’s Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking
(POST) Project, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. POST has funding
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from the Sloan and Moore Foundations to deploy acoustic line arrays across
the continental shelf at numerous locations along the West Coast spanning
from California to the Aleutians. The initial focus of POST has been on
tracking juvenile salmon migrations and estimating their survivorship during
critical stages of their life history. Additional species will be added as the full
POST array is completed by 2010.
Last year, the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN), a global expansion of the
POST concept, was funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation. I have
been invited to lead an international training program for OTN. The
foundation for this OTN training program will be the series of summer Marine
Bioacoustics courses that I have been coordinating at Friday Harbor
Laboratories (FHL) during alternate, odd-numbered years since 2003. Funding
for this series of advanced, graduate-level courses has been provided by the
Office of Naval Research (ONR), and both ONR and OTN have committed to
continue support for an expanded program through 2012.
The Integration of Research and Teaching
As a faculty member at Cornell, I have worked hard to be a dedicated
educator as well as research scientist. Throughout my career, I have promoted
the integration of research and teaching in the ocean sciences through several
series of summer workshops and courses. This effort began in 1991 when I
chaired a panel discussion on training and human resources development at a
National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop on US GLOBEC Acoustic
Instrumentation. The recommendations from this panel discussion led to
funding by ONR of a series of six summer workshops and courses on
Bioacoustical Oceanography that ran from 1993 - 1998. The first training
workshop was held during the summer of 1993 at FHL. This workshop
focused on plankton and fisheries acoustics, the conventional topics addressed
in bioacoustical oceanography. The following summer (1994), I hosted a
research and educational planning workshop at Cornell that focused on the
topic of Marine Mammals and Acoustic Remote Sensing. This meeting set
the stage for the next four courses in which marine mammals and passive
acoustic techniques were added to the list of topics previously covered. The
Bioacoustical Oceanography courses conducted during the summers of 19951997 were held at the University of California in Santa Cruz, California; the
1998 course was held at the Cornell’s Shoals Marine Laboratory. Whereas the
first few workshops and courses were directed at advanced graduate students
and postdoctoral investigators, the last two were offered to advanced
undergraduates as well.
In 1998, I decided that we had trained enough students in bioacoustical
oceanography to meet the existing demand and other areas of ocean remote
sensing required similar attention. Therefore, I assisted Dr. Bruce Monger in
organizing a new summer course focusing on Applications of Satellite Remote
Sensing in Biological Oceanography. Dr. Monger and I subsequently secured
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funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and he has
offered this course to students since Summer 1999. In 2002, program
managers at ONR requested that I consider restarting the bioacoustics courses.
This led to the funding of our current grant, which has supported a five-year
series of Marine Bioacoustics courses from 2003-2007. Program managers at
ONR have committed to supporting an expansion of these courses for an
additional five years through 2012.
The most rewarding aspect of our acoustic and satellite remote-sensing
workshops and courses has been the opportunity to promote teaching at the
cutting edge of research in biological oceanography. Our students have had
the unique opportunity to work side by side with internationally renowned
scientists using state-of-the-art instrumentation and techniques. Each
workshop or course has acted as a research magnet, attracting top scientists to
conduct their own research in a creative teaching environment. A better sense
of what these courses have accomplished in terms of research can be found in
a special issue of Deep-Sea Research that I edited with Dr. Tim Stanton, of the
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Dr. Kurt Fristrup, of Cornell’s
Bioacoustics Program. Nearly all of the contributors to this special issue on
Bioacoustical Oceanography had some affiliation with our 1993-1998 courses
as either faculty members, students, or, in some cases, as both.
In addition to graduate education, which lends itself more naturally to the
integration of research and teaching, I also have developed a reputation at
Cornell as an innovator in undergraduate education. I have developed field
courses in marine ecology on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and on Hawaii
Island. These field courses have been developed in addition to the courses I
teach on main campus, including Introduction to Oceanography, Marine
Ecosystem Dynamics, and Marine Ecology. Although the field courses are
intensive and add considerably to my teaching load, I offer them because I
know that these are where students draw their inspiration to pursue careers in
oceanography and marine biology. In recognition of my contributions to
undergraduate education, Cornell has honored me with the J.P. and Mary
Barger Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Engineering during
1998, the Merrill Presidential Scholar Outstanding Educator Award during
1999, and a Faculty Innovation in Teaching Fellowship during 2001-2002.
Finally, when it comes to education, I am committed to the principal that no
developing nations or underrepresented groups should be left behind.
International capacity building is a major component of the OTN training
program, and that will be reflected in the Marine Bioacoustics courses that we
will be offering during the next five years. In our previous courses, between
1993 and 2007, we trained over 165 undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral
students from 25 different countries. Female graduate students, including
those from developing nations, have been given prominent leadership roles in
these courses. Our goal has been to establish a tradition in this field of
encouraging female students, from the United States as well as those from
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developing nations, to envision themselves among the next generation of
leaders in oceanography and marine biology.
Recently Organized Symposia and Workshops:
Symposium and Workshop: “The Response of Northeast and Northwest
Atlantic Shelf Ecosystems to Climate Variability and Change. American
Society of Limnology and Oceanography Summer Meeting, Copenhagen,
Denmark; June 2000. Organizers: Charles Greene and Benjamin Planque.
Workshop: “Response of NW Atlantic Marine Ecosystems to Climate
Variability,” National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa
Barbara, CA; Spring 2001. Organizer: Charles Greene.
Symposium and Workshop: “Marine Ecosystem Responses to Climate: The
Responses of Large Marine Ecosystems to Interdecadal-Scale Climate
Variability.” American Society of Limnology and Oceanography/American
Geophysical Union Ocean Sciences Meeting, Honolulu, Hawaii; February
2002. Organizers: Charles Greene, Michael Fogarty, and Nathan Mantua.
Workshop: “Climate-Based Assessment and Forecasting of Ecosystems in
the Gulf of Maine,” Boston, Massachusetts: December 2004. Organizers:
Andrew Pershing and Charles Greene.
Workshop: “Responses of NW Atlantic Shelf Ecosystems to Arctic Climate
Change,” Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Portland, Maine: November 2006.
Organizers: Andrew Pershing and Charles Greene.
Symposium: “Influence of Recent Changes in the Arctic on Sub-arctic and
Mid-latitude Marine Ecosystems,” ASLO/AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting,
Orlando, FL: March 2008. Organizers: Andrew Pershing, David Mountain,
Igor Belkin, and Charles Greene.
Recent Invited Talks at International Meetings:
Invited Talk: Greene, C.H., and A.J. Pershing. Trans-Atlantic responses of
Calanus finmarchicus to basin-scale forcing associated with the North
Atlantic Oscillation. American Geophysical Union Chapman Conference on
the North Atlantic Oscillation, Ourense, Spain; November 2000.
Invited Talk: Greene, C.H., and A.J. Pershing. Trans-Atlantic responses of
Calanus finmarchicus to basin-scale forcing associated with the North
Atlantic Oscillation. 70th Anniversary of the Continuous Plankton Recorder
Surveys of North Atlantic Symposium, Edinburgh, Scotland; August 2001.
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Invited Talk: Greene, C.H., and A.J. Pershing. Biocomplexity and climate:
recovery of the North Atlantic right whale population in the context of
climate-induced changes in oceanographic processes. Climate Change and
Aquatic Systems, Plymouth, England; July 2004.
Invited Talk: Greene, C.H. Oceanographic responses to climate variability in
the Northwest Atlantic. Coordinating Research on the North Atlantic
(CORONA) Workshop, Plymouth, England; July 2004.
Recent Publications:
Benfield, M.C., P.H. Wiebe, T.K. Stanton, C.S. Davis, S.M. Gallager, and
C.H. Greene. 1998. Estimating the spatial distribution of zooplankton
biomass by combining video plankton recorder and single-frequency acoustic
data. Deep-Sea Res. II 45: 1175-1199.
Greene, C.H., P.H. Wiebe, C.R. Pelkie, M.C. Benfield, and J.M. Popp. 1998.
Three-dimensional acoustic visualization of zooplankton patchiness. Deep-Sea
Res. II 45: 1201-1217.
Greene, C.H., P.H. Wiebe, A.J. Pershing, G. Gal, J.M. Popp, N.J. Copley,
T.C. Austin, A. M. Bradley, R.G. Goldsborough, J. Dawson, R. Hendershott,
and S. Kaartvedt. 1998. Assessing the distribution and abundance of
zooplankton: a comparison of acoustic and net-sampling methods with DBAD MOCNESS. Deep-Sea Res. II 45: 1219-1237.
Greene, C.H., and A.J. Pershing. 2000. The response of Calanus finmarchicus
populations to climate variability in the Northwest Atlantic: Basin-scale
forcing associated with the North Atlantic Oscillation. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 57:
1536-1544.
MERCINA. 2001. Oceanographic responses to climate in the Northwest
Atlantic. Oceanography 14: 77-83.
Drinkwater, K.F., A. Belgrano, A. Borja, A. Conversi, M. Edwards, C.H.
Greene, G. Ottersen, A.J. Pershing, and H. Walker. 2002. The response of
marine ecosystems to climate variability associated with the North Atlantic
Oscillation. Pages 211-234 in J.W. Hurrell, Y. Kushnir, G. Ottersen, and M.
Visbeck, editors. The North Atlantic Oscillation: Climatic Significance and
Environmental Impact. American Geophysical Union Monograph Series Vol.
134, Washington, DC.
Wiebe, P.H., T.K. Stanton, C.H. Greene, M.C. Benfield, T.C. Austin, and J.
Warren. 2002. BIOMAPER II: an integrated instrument platform for coupled
biological and physical measurements in coastal and oceanic regimes. IEEE J.
Ocean. Eng. 27: 700-716.
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Barton, A.D., C.H. Greene, B.C. Monger, and A.J. Pershing. 2003.
Continuous plankton recorder survey phytoplankton measurements and the
North Atlantic Oscillation: interannual to multidecadal variability in the
Northwest Shelf, Northeast Shelf, and Central North Atlantic Ocean. Prog.
Oceanogr. 58: 337-358.
Benfield, M.C., A. Lavery, P.H. Wiebe, T.K. Stanton, C.H. Greene, and N.
Copley. 2003. Distributions of physonect siphonulae in the Gulf of Maine and
their potential as important sources of acoustic scattering. Can. J. Fish. Aquat.
Sci. 60: 759-772.
Greene, C.H., and A.J. Pershing. 2003. The flip-side of the North Atlantic
Oscillation and modal shifts in slope-water circulation patterns. Limnol.
Oceanogr. 48: 319-322.
Greene, C.H., A.J. Pershing, R.D. Kenney, and J.W. Jossi. 2003. Impact of
climate variability on the recovery of endangered North Atlantic right whales.
Oceanography 16: 96-101.
MERCINA. 2003. Trans-Atlantic responses of Calanus finmarchicus
populations to basin-scale forcing associated with the North Atlantic
Oscillation. Prog. Oceanogr. 58: 301-312.
Greene, C.H., and A.J. Pershing. 2004. Climate and the conservation biology
of North Atlantic right whales: being a right whale at the wrong time? Front.
Ecol. Environ. 2: 29-34.
MERCINA. 2004. Supply-side ecology and the response of zooplankton to
climate-driven changes in North Atlantic Ocean circulation. Oceanogr. 17(3):
10-21.
Pershing, A.J., C.H. Greene, B. Planque, and J.-M. Fromentin. 2004. The
influence of climate variability on North Atlantic zooplankton populations.
Page 59-69 in N.C. Stenseth, G. Ottersen, J. Hurrell, and A. Belgrano, editors.
Ecological Effects of Climatic Variations in the North Atlantic. Oxford
University Press.
MERCINA. 2004. Supply-side ecology and the response of zooplankton to
climate-driven changes in North Atlantic Ocean circulation. Oceanography
17(3): 10-21.
Pershing, A.J., C.H. Greene, J.W. Jossi, L. O’Brien, J.K.T. Brodziak, and B.A.
Bailey. 2005. Interdecadal variability in the Gulf of Maine zooplankton
community with potential impacts on fish recruitment. ICES J. Mar. Sci. 62:
511-523.
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Greene, C.H., and A.J. Pershing. 2007. Climate drives sea change. Science
315: 1084-1085.
Greene, C.H., A.J. Pershing, T.M. Cronin, and N. Cecci. 2008. Arctic climate
change and its impacts on the ecology of the North Atlantic. Ecology: in press.
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