Sustained ecological observing, how hard can it be?
Abstract
Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) is a national scale, sustained observing system that has now been operating for a decade. The direction of IMOS has been strongly influenced by developments in the Global Ocean Observing System, particularly the integration of physical, chemical and biological observing, from open-ocean to coast. In addition to more mature approaches for measuring physical and chemical variables, IMOS has piloted sustained observing of benthic habitats, primary and secondary producers, mid-trophic, and higher trophic level organisms. Observing technologies used include autonomous underwater vehicles, continuous plankton recorders, underway measurements from ships of opportunity, monthly vessel-based sampling, bio-optical sensors on buoys and gliders, echo sounders, acoustic telemetry, bio-logging, noise logging and satellite remote sensing. Increased focus is now being placed on producing valued added products from biological time series, and working with biogeochemical and ecosystem modellers to help reduce model uncertainties, and to get feedback on future design of the observing system. Significant steps have been made towards the long term goal of sustained ecological observing, and important lessons learned along the way.
- Publication:
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American Geophysical Union, Ocean Sciences Meeting
- Pub Date:
- February 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUOSOD12A..05M
- Keywords:
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- 4262 Ocean observing systems;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERALDE: 4294 Instruments and techniques;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: GENERALDE: 6339 System design;
- POLICY SCIENCES