Merger produces business opportunities
Photo/Rebecca Goldfine
Don Perkins, president of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute
Two Portland nonprofits focused on the sea have merged to save one from extinction and to enhance the research and development capacities of both.
The Gulf of Maine Research Institute, on Commercial Street, recently absorbed the smaller GoMOOS and its staff of five to help GMRI expand its projects and to ensure the survival of GoMOOS and its valuable data-collecting systems, according to GMRI President Don Perkins.
GoMOOS, short for Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System, was founded 10 years ago to gather marine data in real time. A network of buoys moored throughout the gulf record information on wind speed and direction, wave height, air and water temperature, salinity, visibility, chlorophyll concentration and even solar zenith angles. (See this data here.)
GMRI, which was founded about 40 years ago, is a marine research institute that also educates and reaches out into the marine community to help foster cooperation among stakeholders.
"What GoMOOS got is an opportunity to shift out of a struggle for survival and integrate into a larger institute where they can leverage our scientific expertise and our education expertise to develop new marine information tools and solutions," Perkins says.
GoMOOS, which has a budget of around $700,000, had been struggling to remain federally funded as sources dried up over the past five years. Within the past year it had been searching for a partner agency to merge with, whittling its choices down to three, Perkins says, before deciding on GMRI, which has diverse revenue sources that feed an annual budget of about $6 million.
Evan Richert, who helped found GoMOOS, says his organization had become too small to compete for grants. "We needed critical mass, and GMRI had that critical mass," he says. "[The merger] will allow the staff to compete for the funds to carry out our mission."
Perkins likens GoMOOS' new home at GMRI as being permanently nestled within a marketing focus group, since GMRI's marine experts are like a microcosm of the larger scientific community that GoMOOS targets.
"It is like developing a product in intimate contact with your customers," he says. "GoMOOS is now living inside its focus group. They will be in continuous intimate contact with representatives in marine science, which is going to lead to rapid product development and more insight into emerging research."
Perkins says GMRI, in turn, will be enhanced by taking advantage of GoMOOS oceanographic systems to manage huge amounts of data. By melding GoMOOS' technical expertise and GMRI's scientific expertise, the two agencies can develop new ways to monitor the effects of climate change and ocean acidification, for example.
Together, they might design better storm-forecasting tools as climate change causes increasingly erratic weather patterns, which could be of value to the insurance industry. "We're a business-savvy research institute, and we're constantly looking for new opportunities to apply marine research and science," he says. "There will be a continuous output of ideas like that that GoMOOS will be facilitating because they're embedded in an institution that is grappling with these problems."
Although at the moment Perkins says the merger won't result in new jobs, he says growth could happen in a year or so. But he points out that the merger will have a beneficial impact on Maine's economy.
GoMOOS collects and reads digital information from its buoys as well as uses its data to make forecasts, and puts it all on the Internet for free.
"Making that data available to lobstermen, ground fishermen, ports around the coast of Maine, recreational surfers, recreational fishermen -- those industries add up to billions of dollars for New England," Perkins says.
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