Evolving and Sustaining Ocean Best Practices – Workshop III
The oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, and human health. Given their vast dimensions and internal complexity, efficient monitoring and predicting of the planet’s oceans must be a collaborative effort of both regional and global scale. The first and foremost requirement for such collaborative ocean observing is the need to follow well-defined and reproducible methods across activities: from strategies for structuring observing systems, sensor deployment
Seabed 2030: Building a Complete Global Bathymetry Map by 2030
Vicki Ferrini Bathymetry data is important observational information that can be used for a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies. Despite its importance for understanding processes at and beneath the seafloor, and throughout the water column, only a small portion of the global seafloor has been mapped with direct measurement. The Nippon Foundation – GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project aims to bring together all available bathymetric data to produce a complete map of the world ocean
Essential Ocean Variables: Marine Turtle, Bird and Mammal Abundance and Distribution
Jordan van Stavel Marine turtle, bird and mammal species are wide-ranging, large-bodied, long-lived animals that play a key role in structuring marine ecosystems. Also known as ecosystem engineers these megafauna interact and influence the population dynamics and distribution of important prey species as well as directly impacting their environment through nutrient exchange and transport. In this Essential Ocean Variable (EOV ) category, abundance refers to the number of individuals within a pop
Workshop Summary – Designing the Global Observing System for Marine Life
A global ocean observing system based on monitoring biological essential ocean variables (EOVs) is urgently needed to assess, predict and manage the status of marine biodiversity and ecosystems. Earlier this year, more than 20 international specialists at Santa Barbara, California, met to design the necessary backbone for global data collection and reporting. Workshop co-leader Nic Bax says existing data collection networks vary widely in scope and sophistication, and for the next decade, techno