GMRI's lab may have opened just five short years ago, but we have already earned the respect of major scientific entities as a leader in fishery research. NOAA has recently approved a joint proposal to establish a Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region (CINAR) as partnership between GMRI, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and University of Maine School of Marine Sciences.

CINAR is only the second marine-focused Cooperative Institute to be approved in the U.S. and will serve as NOAA's preferred research partner in the North Atlantic region. This opens up new funding possibilities and creates a remarkable opportunity for our scientists to collaborate on research across the Gulf of Maine and Mid-Atlantic. This research will disentangle the impacts of manageable human activities (e.g., fishing pressure, transportation, pollution, habitat destruction, introduction of invasive species) from those caused by variable climatic and oceanographic condition (e.g., severe storms, seasonal variability, decadal-scale climate shifts, global warming trends). This will improve forecasting of what the future holds for the North Atlantic region.