INTAROS kicked off 2019 with its General Assembly meeting in Bremen, Germany, kindly hosted by the University of Bremen. The Consortium came together at the Haus der Wissenschaft for a week-long series of meetings and workshops, running from 7th to 11th January.

The week kicked off with a day-and-a-half dedicated to a WP2 Workshop on results of data assessment, data exploitation and modelling assessed gap analysis. Day two saw a workshop from WP6 on Application of iAOS towards stakeholders, as well as a presentation by Pier Luigi Buttigieg, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), on "The Ocean Best Practices System".

The General Assembly took centre stage on Wednesday 9th January, bringing together all members of the Consortium to report and discuss progress, highlights and achievements during the past year. An exciting contribution to the General Assembly were talks by some of the non-European collaborators who presented INTAROS work in the USA, Canada, Russia, China and Korea:

• Hajo Eicken, University of Alaska, USA.
• Kim Juniper, Ocean Network Canada.
• Nikolai Mikhailov, RIHMI-WDC, Russia.
• Yubao Qiu, RADI, China.
• Hyun-cheol Kim, KOPRI, Korea.

Another exciting contribution was by the Arctic cluster project: APPLICATE (Luisa Cristini, AWI).

Day four saw workshops from WP4: Results and further work on Community-Based Managment, WP5: Practical data delivery to the project, WP7: Dissemination and Outreach, as well as internal training on RGeostats and a meeting of the project Advisory Panel. Throughout the week there were also a series of planning meetings for various workpackages including WP3 and WP6.

Finally, the week wrapped up with a meeting of the Steering Committee where plans for the year ahead were identified and milestones for 2019 were set.

Watch this space for some upcoming highlights from 2018 and tune into out social media channels for all the latest from the project.