The University of Maine plans to start accepting students in 2007 for a new marine research graduate program it’s establishing on the Portland waterfront.

The university, whose main campus is in Orono, would accept five or six students next year for master’s and doctoral degree candidates in the Portland program, and would expand later to eight to 20 students, said professor David Townsend, director of UMaine’s School of Marine Sciences.

Townsend said he hopes to make the school one of the 10 largest marine research and education programs in the United States.

The school’s expanded program will be based at the recently completed Gulf of Maine Research Institute. UMaine has hired two marine science professors, from the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University, who will start setting up the graduate program at the institute in September.

They include Jeffrey Runge, a UNH research professor who specializes in zooplankton ecology and food web dynamics, and Andrew Pershing, Cornell assistant professor who specializes in using computers for biological oceanography.

Townsend said he and UM President Robert Kennedy started talking about expanding the School of Marine Sciences five years ago in response to growing interest in the environment, climate change and fisheries preservation.

The program may eventually expand to include undergraduate students and faculty of the University of Southern Maine and the University of Maine at Machias, Townsend said. He noted that UMaine offers the only graduate-level marine science program in the state university system.

UMaine will spend $471,000 to start the program this year and plans to spend more than $200,000 a year after that.