Permits In

The sure sign of science about to happen - the permits have been applied for! In usual situations you would try and do this a good six months or so before an expedition goes forward, so we're a little late in the game on this one with all the crazy travel i've been on - but as Glacier Bay National Park (GBNP) is relatively small and this is just a reconnaissance mission this year with no major sampling, it's hopefully not going to be too much of a problem.

So why apply for permits, why do we need them? For this project we want to look for cold-water corals in GBNP. This special place was protected as a National Park for in 1980, but even before that it had been a National Preserve since 1925, and today is even a United Nations World Heritage site - meaning it's unique and valuable to our global ecosystem. I'll tell you more about this park in the coming weeks as we get set to go.

Back to the permits - those who protect and preserve GBNP, the National Park Service, have to be careful what and how much is taken from inside the park, so every scientist who wants to work there has to fill out a permit saying how many people are involved, what you want to do and what you want to take - even if you just want to take photographs and measurements and not actual samples. As the park is run by the federal government too, so is paid for by tax payers, it's important that the samples that are taken and the data that is produced is archived somewhere public - so storing samples in museums, publishing data in peer reviewed papers, storing data on online databases, or even just it being made public what data you have and that you can be contacted for that data at any time. Permits are good things, they keep the pressures on resources down so these ecosystems will be there always for people to enjoy, and they keep us scientists honest!

So it'll probably be a month before I get the permit finalized, but we're on our way. I'll describe the 2010 mission in more detail in next weeks post.

Dr W.