On behalf of CREON Integration Meeting Committee, we are pleased to invite you to participate in the Global Coral Reef Environmental Observatory Network (CREON; www.coralreefeon.org) Integration Meeting, which will be held at Kenting, Taiwan, 13-14 March 2008.

The meeting will be held in conjunction with 14th PRAGMA workshop. PRAGMA is an internationally renowned grid community with rich expertise from data/resources, bioscience, telescience and geoscience. The co-location with the PRAGMA meeting will encourage sharing of expertise and stimulate the development of CREON technology as well as foster the growth of the CREON community. At the end of the meeting, we hope to develop an organizational prototype and to have focused working groups formed with action items planned within each working group.

Registration to the meeting is now opened at http://www.nchc.org.tw/event/2008/pragma/sign.php. Please take few minutes to register and actively participate in the meeting. Should you have any question about the meeting please contact the meeting secretariat Hsiu-Mei Chou, hmchou@nchc.org.tw.

CREON is a grass roots effort to form a community consisting of marine biologists, ecologists, computer scientists and application engineers, with common interests in understanding coral reef ecosystems. CREON activities include workshops, joint research, student exchange, and postdoctoral research. It provides opportunities to connect people, exchange experiences, share data, link research sites and conduct joint research, etc. The community in particular is dedicated to bridging science and IT, which echoes strongly the NSF Atkins report “Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure”.

The community currently involves active collaboration between scientists working at the Moorea Coral Reef LTER site, a US Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, the Kenting Coral Reef ILTER site of Taiwan and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. There is a broad and constant participation from the following institutes:

· University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), US

· Australia Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), Australia

· James Cook University (JCU), Australia

· Melbourne University (Uni Melb), Australia

· National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), US

· National Museum of Marine Biology and Aquarium (NMMBA), Taiwan

· Research Center for Biodiversity Academia Sinica (RCBAS),Taiwan

· National Chung Hsing University (NCHU), Taiwan

· University of California San Diego (UCSD), US

· California Institute of Telecommunication and Information Technology (Calit2), US

· National Center for High Performance Computing (NCHC), Taiwan.

We hope to structure and extend CREON further via this integration meeting.

Look forward to meeting you in March.

Program Committee:

Chair: Fang-Pang Lin

Co-Chair: Tung-Yung Fan

Peter Arzberger, Sally Holbrook, Stuart Kininmonth, Kwang-Tsao Shao, Rong-Quei Jan

contact: Stuart Kininmonth for more information