It is proposed to prepare a second edition of the Wiley-Blackwell textbook, Biological Oceanography by Charles B. Miller of Oregon State University. The new version will be coauthored by Dr. Patricia A. Wheeler, also at Oregon State University. She will concentrate on phytoplankton biology and ecology, marine microbiology and will contribute to chapters on pelagic ecosystem cycles, that is the spring bloom chapter (currently chapter 1) and the redescription of oceanic biomes (chapter 11). She will review and comment on all of the rest. Dr. Miller will concentrate on the remaining chapters and contribute to revision of 1 and 11, reviewing Dr. Wheeler's chapters in return. Our target date for manuscript completion is spring, 2010. Scientific developments through the end of 2009 will be available for inclusion. The current edition is widely accepted for its intended purpose support for basic courses in biological oceanography at the graduate level. We are frequently told by colleagues that mastering the book end-to-end is basic training for doctoral candidacy examinations in biological oceanography. Thus, maintenance of the content so that it reflects recent progress will be a good service to our field. The new book will have the same general content and outlook as the original. We will again focus on an audience of new graduate students in oceanography, readers well trained in one or several basic sciences with reasonably strong mathematical skills. We will not assume a great deal of knowledge of physical or chemical oceanography, but for some topics (upwelling, carbonate chemistry of seawater, etc.) we will refer readers to suitable sources for necessary information in those areas. Most graduate training programs in oceanography teach physical, chemical and geological oceanography in so-called 'core' courses in parallel with a biological oceanography core course. It is the students in this last, an ocean ecology core course, whom we intend to reach and teach. What the book will not cover We realize that a number of topics part of, or closely associated with, biological oceanography will be left out: Ø Seawater as a physical and chemical habitat mass, pressure, viscosity, buoyancy, drag, heat capacity (thermal buffering), stratification, light attenuation, air-sea interaction, waves, gas exchange, water molecule dissociation and pH (CO2 system and pH buffering), solute dissociation and solvation effects, ionic strength, light attenuation, scattering, visual paths and more Ø Estuarine ecology Ø Marine pollution and its biological impacts Ø Marine mammal ecology Each of those could supply materials for a separate book, of course. However, we feel they are not part of the 'core' curriculum that should be covered in a basic ocean ecology course for beginning oceanography students. We are considering, but have not decided upon, one or two brief appendices. One would present necessary mathematics: exponential functions (e.g., population growth, light attenuation), Michaelis-Menton and Ivlev functions, P vs. I functions. However, those relationships might best be presented in boxes exactly where they are first to be used. Another appendix would be a primer on molecular genetics: genes from a Mendelian perspective, the roles of enzymes and their relation to genes, the DNA code, transcription that produces messenger-RNA (mRNA), ribosomal-DNA (rDNA) and ribosomal-RNA, translation of mRNA as protein in ribosomes, mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) vs. nuclear-DNA, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and DNA sequencing. Tricks of the trade that we will discover needing to explain as we rewrite the chapters might include generation of cDNA from mRNA (reverse transcriptase), cDNA-binding fluorescent arrays (which have more and more ecological applications), FISH (fluorescence in situ hybridization) and more. Probably all of those should only be introduced as needed. We are aware that Wiley-Blackwell has another basic text in biological oceanography at about the same level, K.H. Mann and J. R Lazier's third edition of Dynamics of Marine Ecosystems: Biological-Physical Interactions in the Oceans (2006). However, the contents of the two volumes are very different and remarkably complementary. It will be our aim to keep that distinction. We will refer to interactions of ecological processes to ocean physics when we must (vertical mixing supplying nutrients), but those interactions will be much less the focus of our book than it is for Mann and Lazier.