As pointed out, in 1997, by the Site Review Team, the "PIs have very good to excellent interpersonal working relationships," and "there is a remarkable collegiality among the group members." The Site Review Team also highlighted a number of site management issues that needed to be examined before resubmittal. Because of these concerns and other factors, the structure of MCM leadership and management has changed in several important ways during the past year.

In March, 1997, R. A. Wharton, Jr. announced that he would not be involved in MCM-II. Within a few weeks of this announcement Dr. Lyons was elected lead PI for the resubmittal. At this time, it was decided to move the Data Management component of MCM-I from DRI to INSTAAR at the University of Colorado under the direction of Dr. McKnight. In September, 1997, Dr. Wharton resigned as lead PI for the remainder of MCM-I. In response, year six of MCM-I has been transferred from the Desert Research Institute, University of Nevada, Reno to the University of Alabama as of March 1998, but Dr. Lyons has currently served as de facto lead PI of MCM-I since September 1997. Dr. Lyons appointed an Executive Committee of Drs. Fountain, Priscu, and Wall to help manage the MCM. Before this time, a "committee-of-the-whole" functioned as the Executive Committee, an arrangement found problematic for the future by the Site Review Team. Currently all issues involving science management, personnel, allocation of field slots and other resources are taken up by the Executive Committee. This new protocol provides both flexibility and rapid response to internal changes in science/resource priorities and to external Network requests and addresses the concerns posed by the Site Review Team. In addition to these management changes, Dr. Ross Virginia (Dartmouth College) has become a PI for year 6 of MCM-I and for MCM-II to add expertise in soil biogeochemistry. Independently, the Site Review Team pointed to the same deficiency. The responsibility for components of the core monitoring and experimental program is distributed among the PIs. This approach has worked well for MCM-I (based on complete submission of data sets), and will be continued for MCM-II.

The PIs formally meet twice a year. One meeting is in the late winter/early spring to address logistic and scientific needs for the upcoming field season. NSF's Office of Polar Programs requires a detailed summary of our logistic needs, often exceeding 100 pages, by 1 April for the upcoming field season starting in October. During this meeting, the PIs re-evaluate the financial and logistic resources to meet changing scientific priorities and opportunities. This meeting is rotated among the home institutions of the PIs. The second formal meeting is a science workshop to which all individuals, either associated with, or interested in MCM, are invited. The Site Review pointed out that we did not have a open forum to exchange scientific information between PIs, students, and the staff of the project. In response, we held our first workshop in Boulder in June, 1997. Because of its great success, the workshop will continue to serve as an important opportunity for integration and synthesis within the various compon ents of MCM. We feel strongly that we have made significant and positive changes in our scientific management and we have addressed the concerns outlined by the Site Review Team.

For MCM-II we recruited two new PIs to the project: Dr. Virginia (previously discussed) and Dr. Peter Doran. Dr. Doran (University of Nevada-Reno) will study paleohydrological/ paleolimnological aspects of the MCM and be responsible for a suite of measurements (identified as core data in MCM-II) on the physical characteristics of the lakes. Dr. Cathy Tate decided not to participate in MCM-II and Dr. McKnight will continue the stream ecology component. The benthic algal mat work initiated by Dr. Wharton in MCM-I will be continued by Dr. Ian Hawes, an official collaborator from the National Institute for Water and Atmosphere, Christchurch, New Zealand. He has been active with MCM since 1995 and has worked in Antarctica since 1978. In addition to Dr. Hawes, we will continue our formal collaborations with Dr. Johanna Laybourn-Parry, University of Nottingham, England (protozoa), Dr. Gayle Dana, Desert Research Institute (radiation energy balance, remote sensing), and Dr. David Marchant, Boston University (geomorphology). We will continue our long-term cooperation with USGS-WRD personnel, especially with Dr. Ned Andrews, in our hydrology/fluvial geomorphological studies.

We receive numerous requests every year from scientists desiring to work with us on MCM. Because we are limited by the number of individuals that NSF-OPP can support in the field, we discuss and prioritize, as a group, our collaborations for the upcoming field season at our Spring PI meeting. Within this framework, MCM-I has collaborated with over 60 other scientists during the past five years in both field work and in collaborations involving provision of samples and intersite comparisons. This does not include Dr. Wall's collaboration with SCAR's BIOTEX (Biological Investigations of Terrestrial Ecosystem) experiment which consists of a number of British and Italian scientists. MCM-LTER collaborators included a large number of international scientists from New Zealand, Russia, Canada, Britain, Germany and Italy. We are developing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Terrestrial and Freshwater Life Sciences Division of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). This MOU would encourage the exchange of scient ists, especially those working on the soil ecosystem, between our two groups. This adds more expertise in the area of terrestrial ecosystem research to MCM. The MCM-LTER has recently been recognized as an important component of the international global change research programs as outlined by the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR). Recently, Dr. T. Kulbe of the Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany, has proposed a collaboration with us to the DFG in Germany to obtain sediment cores from Lake Bonney in support of our legacy/paleoclimate related work. We feel that MCM has been at the forefront of international LTER collaboration. We will continue to encourage non-LTER scientists (both U.S. and international) to collaborate with us within the constraint of limited field slots.