Connecting science to ocean policy and management: The California Ocean Science Trust

Science integration is fundamentally about tackling the challenge of connecting knowledge with action. Making these connections takes active effort, working across boundaries, honoring and translating knowledge from multiple domains. This is an institutional, political, intellectual, communications, and even cultural challenge. In this talk I will outline this challenge and then talk about the tools, institutions, and skills needed for effective science integration, focusing in particular on some of the approaches that the California Ocean Science Trust, a non-profit boundary organization, is using to craft a constructive role for science in ocean and coastal decision making.