Through our engagement over the last five years, aoos has resoundingly heard the need for workforce development and community-led programs

The portfolio included in this proposal meets these needs throughout alaska. For this proposal, aoos evaluated our overall ioos portfolio with our base, bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL), regional ocean partnership (ROP), and harmful algal bloom (HAB) programs to be able to maximize the program longevity, enhance capabilities across the system, improve equity of services within and across communities, and enable advancements to the ioos ocean information network capacity. For topic area 1, aoos is prioritizing aoos? Capacity for program administration with hiring of a project manager and a data coordinator (25%). We are also prioritizing workforce development in new partners to increase coastal resilience within their organization, support of community-led observing programs, support of regional networks, and data management. Finally, we included funds for to be determined (TBD) projects and travel/participant support so that we have the flexibility to be responsive to new partnerships or programs added by listening to the needs of the communities with whom we are working. For topic area 2, aoos is prioritizing aoos? Capacity for increased engagement within alaska and with other regional associations with the hiring of two new employees, an alaska water level watch (awlw) coordinator and data coordinator (75%). We are prioritizing the coordination of regional data and expansion of data management projects by investing in improvement of the axiom data science (axiom) data portal infrastructure that is shared with three other regional associations (sccoos, cencoos, and secoora). We are also investing in projects in which aoos has been a leader such as the awlw and backyard buoys programs. Finally, we are investing in instrumentation to expand the detection of tagged animals and the marine heatwave along the west coast of the US. The activities and projects in this proposal were all selected based on aoos? Goal of providing support for alaskan communities to build foundational coastal resilience. These projects support the communities? Need for resources, workforce development, sharing of data and information, and involvement in decision-making processes. We have categorized these projects as 1) data management, 2) TBD community-led projects, 3) community-led observing, 4) workforce development, and 5) support of regional networks. Many of the projects could fit into more than one of these categories. In addition to our overall goal of including projects that will support coastal communities resilience, our strategy was also to maximize funding by supporting some of these projects for three or four years rather than the full five years of the IRA funding. This will allow US to fund more projects for a long enough period of time (three years) for the project to have the opportunity to show initial value and success, and to build up resources necessary to continue the work with either future continued aoos funding (through base, ROP, HAB, or BIL) or through other sources of funding. There is greater awareness of the necessity for indigenous and coastal community members to be directly involved in the planning and design phase of research projects, rather than researchers arriving in the community with a defined research plan including funding already designated. The activities included in the aoos portfolio are within this context, with the overall goal being to broaden the ownership, participation, and capacity of indigenous and coastal community members in the research planning, data collection and dissemination of ocean observing data, directly utilizing local expertise. Partnerships built around a CO-design process will strengthen collaboration and include diverse perspectives in the field of ocean observing. Success is often quantified by the numbers of people, organizations, or…