The leadership and joint members of the CLIVAR/IOC-GOOS Indian Ocean Region Panel (IORP) and the Sustained Indian Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (SIBER) of IMBeR held a telecon on 23 April 2021, to discuss how to strengthen the cooperation between the groups. The SIBER chair (Greg Cowie) and co-chair (Raleigh Hood), IORP co-chairs (Roxy Mathew Koll and Juliet Hermes), IORP-SIBER joint members (Dwi Susanto and Birgit Gaye) and Jing Li from ICPO participated in the meeting.

Participants firstly exchanged the updates from the two groups. Greg introduced new ‘Blue Carbon’ initiative that is being developed by IMBeR, and has the potential to be piloted in Indian Ocean and to cooperate with IORP. Roxy introduced the WCRP restructuring and associated impact on IORP. He mentioned that the SIBER-IORP cooperation can be particularly linked to the WCRP LHAs on ‘My Climate Risk’ and ‘WCRP Academy’.

The discussion then followed mainly focused on: 1) knowledge and technology sharing in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO); 2) Early Career Scientists (ECS) engagement in the Indian Ocean research. SIBER expressed their strong willingness to join the training workshop on observing the coastal and marginal seas in the Western Indian Ocean, proposed by IORP, and could share the innovative easy-to-conduct biogeochemical measurements, such as the coastal moorings and routine transects across the shelf, and the portable ‘nutrient lab’. This can be further developed as protocols or best practices, that can be shared to the broader community.

Meanwhile, motivated by the Atlantic Ocean Youth Ambassadors who have been very successful (Video, Twitter), IORP would also would like to have some ‘Indian Ocean Youth/ECS Ambassadors’ who can improve the networking among existing ECS groups in the Indian Ocean (such as the YESS, ECSN of IIOE-2 and WIOMSA-ECRN), and help to achieve a boarder outreach of Indian Ocean researches. SIBER suggested also include IMECaN, the Interdisciplinary Marine Early Career Network established within IMBeR, into the Indian Ocean ECS networking activities.

Representatives from SIBER are invited to the upcoming IORP-17, to further explore the potential cooperation.