Although it is widely known from the fossil record of deep-sea cores that climate changes on the glacial-interglacial scale generate significant impacts on marine ecosystem productivity and structure, it is only in the last ten to fifteen years that marine scientists have begun to document evidence that basin- or large-scale climate changes might be significant forcing for decadal to millennium-scale changes in marine ecosystems. Tidbits of information led to the development of the Global Ocean Ecosystems Dynamics projects of many individual nations, and to several regional scale programs examining the influence of climate change. In 1994, PICES initiated the Climate Change and Carrying Capacity (CCCC) Program to provide an organizational framework for examining climate impacts on marine ecosystems in the North Pacific. During the past decade, the North Pacific experienced the strong 1997 El Niño and 1998 La Niña, as well, perhaps, as a regime shift in the late 1990s. The purpose of this session is to begin a general synthesis of these studies linking climate change to ecosystem productivity and structure in the North Pacific Ocean.

Many national programs examining climate - ecosystem linkages on a regional scale are nearing conclusion and will benefit by the grander scale, basin-wide, synthesis that will be initiated in this session. We believe that this session will bring together scientists from different regions of the Pacific to share their results, and will encourage collaborations for the broader synthesis that will be the topic of a PICES Symposium planned for April 2006.

Some time will be reserved at the beginning of the session for six short summaries of national GLOBEC efforts by each PICES member nation. These overviews will be given by: David L. Mackas (Institute of Ocean Sciences, Fisheries & Oceans, Canada); Yoshioki Oozeki (National Research Institute of Fisheries Science, Japan); Qisheng Tang (Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute, People's Republic of China); Suam Kim (Pukyong National University, Republic of Korea); Vladimir I. Radchenko (Sakhalin Research Institute of Fisheries & Oceanography, Russia); and Harold P. Batchelder (Oregon State University, U.S.A.)