[U-07] Interactions between Earth system change and marine ecosystems

[U07-02] Promotion of Marine Ecosystem Change Research in WPI-AIMEC

★Invited Papers

*Kentaro Ando¹, Toshio Suga², Fumio Inagaki¹ (1.Japan Agency for Marine and Earth Science and Technology, 2.Tohoku University)

As in the previous lecture, the Advanced Institute for Marine Ecosystem Change (WPI-AIMEC), jointly by Tohoku University and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), was established as a newly adopted center of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI) in FY2023. WPI-AIMEC) on January 1, 2024. The mission of the Institute is to elucidate and predict the response and adaptation mechanisms of marine ecosystems to global system change, and to create a new academic field of “Ocean-Ecosystem Change Systematics”. Unlike the WPI center formation projects conducted by a single host institution at various universities and national research institutes in the past, the operation of this institute is the first project to establish a center by multiple hosts and is a joint research center formation project jointly by a university and a national research institute, which originally have different objectives. For this reason, an inter-laboratory system will be established to link the functions of both universities and national laboratories. In addition, since the establishment of the center is also required to strengthen the international brain/intellectual circulation, we plan to establish research centers in overseas area, and to expand the international joint graduate program that Tohoku University has already implemented to enhance the educational effects of AIMEC. We will report on measures to strengthen such functions that are important for building the center.