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Our civilization needs a clean, resilient, productive, safe, well-observed, documented and predicted ocean. “The ocean we need for the future we want” was the motto of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission proposal to the United Nations to consider the merit of an Ocean Science Decade. By proclaiming the Decade, the UN General Assembly offered the oceanographic community a unique, once in a life-time, opportunity to change the way we do things, make oceanography fit for purpose of effectively supporting sustainable development, and energize the ocean sciences for future generations. The Decade is the chance to put in place a more complete and sustainable observing system and feed the resulting data into a science-based informed decision-making system allowing increased reliance of our civilization on the ocean, its ecosystem services and, at the same time, preserving ocean health. Strong and proactive engagement of the oceanographic community in the design of the Decade and its observing component and subsequent energetic implementation of the ideas are sought. Participants in OceanObs’19 are invited to consider the additional possibilities and requirements associated with the Decade in their contributions to and brainstorming at the Conference. It is essential to use collective wisdom of OceanObs’19 to help developing an ambitious and also realistic implementation plan for the Decade, with a strong observational component. publishedVersion

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 ocean must be a collaborative effort of both regional and global scale. A 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 and usage, and the generation of data and information products, to ethical and governance aspects when executing ocean observing. To meet the urgent, planet-wide challenges we face, methods across all aspects of ocean observing should be broadly adopted by the ocean community and, where appropriate, should evolve into “Ocean Best Practices.” While many groups have created best practices, they are scattered across the Web or buried in local repositories and many have yet to be digitized. To reduce this fragmentation, we introduce a new open access, permanent, digital repository of best practices documentation (oceanbestpractices.org) that is part of the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS). The new OBPS provides an opportunity space for the centralized and coordinated improvement of ocean observing methods. The OBPS repository employs user-friendly software to significantly improve discovery and access to methods. The software includes advanced semantic technologies for search capabilities to enhance repository operations. In addition to the repository, the OBPS also includes a peer reviewed journal research topic, a forum for community discussion and a training activity for use of best practices. Together, these components serve to realize a core objective of the OBPS, which is to enable the ocean community to create superior methods for every activity in ocean observing from research to operations to applications that are agreed upon and broadly adopted across communities. Using selected ocean observing examples, we show how the OBPS supports this objective. This paper lays out a future vision of ocean best practices and how OBPS will contribute to improving ocean observing in the decade to come.

The oceans provide many important functions within the Earth system including strong coupling with weather and climate dynamics, providing food and energy resources, supporting trade and commerce, offering extensive stabilization for variations in our environment and being a resource for biodiversity. The need for improved coordination in ocean observations is more urgent now given the issues of climate change, sustainable food sources, natural hazards such as the 3/11/11 Fukushima tsunami with a devastating impact on nuclear power, and increased need for energy. Ocean researchers must work across disciplines to provide policy makers with clear and understandable assessments of the state of the ocean. Through an NSF-sponsored Ocean Research Coordination Network, a multidisciplinary team is addressing approaches for collaboration and issues that should be addressed to create an effective environment for collaboration within the ocean research community. This paper discusses the early phases of these efforts and some of the initial considerations.

Sustainable development requires the intelligent management of the marine environment, to protect the marine ecosystem, minimise the impacts of climate change and anthropogenic influences, and provide benefits for a wide range of users. Routine ocean monitoring and forecasting based on sound science, long term and adaptive monitoring, and co-operation between nations, is the main tool for such a management. The assets and needs of all countries have to be identified, as well as the constraints impeding data exchange and marine observations in the EEZs. The challenge is to build a monitoring system based on up-to-date science and technology, and adapted to the specificity of the basin for the benefit of different users in all Mediterranean countries. It is necessary to involve all riparian countries in the process of building the Mediterranean monitoring system. A strengthened and dedicated link between the scientific community and the public authorities is moreover necessary to provide a sound scientific background for policy decisions based on environmental monitoring. Building on these concepts the Mediterranean network to Assess and upgrade the Monitoring and forecasting Activity in the region (MAMA), funded under the EESD Programme of the 5th FP, and involving partners from all the Mediterranean countries, aims to establish the multi-national network that will prepare the institutional linkages and regional platform for such an integrated and sustained monitoring system in the region. The project builds on the trans-national pooling of scientific and technological resources and provides a concerted basin-scale effort towards the planning and design of the initial ocean observing system in the Mediterranean. The system-wide approach of MAMA is expected to trigger an enhanced motivation on the relevance of systematic marine observations for the sustainable and shared use of the marine resources of the Mediterranean Sea. These catalytic ingredients constitute the thrust of MAMA and an enabling asset to the future projection into long-term commitments at governmental level.

Data are collected from ocean sciences activities that range from a single investigator working in a laboratory to large teams of scientists cooperating on big, multinational, global ocean research projects. What these activities have in common is that all result in data, some of which are used as the basis for publications in peer-reviewed journals. However, two major problems regarding data remain. First, many data valuable for understanding ocean physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and how the oceans operate in the Earth system are never archived or made accessible to other scientists. Data underlying traditional journal articles are often difficult to obtain. Second, when scientists do contribute data to databases, their data become freely available, with little acknowledgment and no contribution to their career advancement. To address these problems, stronger ties must be made between data repositories and academic journals, and a “digital backbone” needs to be created for data related to journal publications.

A method is described by which the contribution of Non-Living Particulate Organic Matter (NLPOM) to Total Organic Matter can be determined. The dye Trypan Blue stains only dead organic matter. The surface of the stained particles is used as an indirect measure of the NLPOMcarbon content. Applying this method, it is shown that the bivariate linear regression of POM on chlorophyll a may produce serious errors in the calculated NLPOM contribution when carbon which is neither triptonnor chlorophyll-related is present in appreciable quantities. INTRODUCTION easily obtained when enough samples containing the same type of tripton are available. In the euphotic zone, Non-Living Particulate Organic Matter (henceforth NLPOM) is usually determined by calculating the difference between TPOM MATERIAL AND METHODS (Total Particulate Organic Matter) and Living Particulate Organic Matter. The latter is calculated by multiIn our procedure we use the vital stain Trypan Blue. plying the ATP-content, chlorophyll a content, or cell This dye, which is widely used in animal cytology, has count by a conversion factor (Hagmeier 1961, Straththe interesting property of staining proteins in dead rnann 1967, Gassmann & Gillbricht 1982). This method cells or particles only. For our purpose we have modhas several disadvantages, all related to the determiified the original recipe published by Phillips (1973) as nation of the 'Living Carbon' (Banse 1977). The carbon follows. To obtain 100 m1 solution, 0.4 g Trypan Blue, to chlorophyll ratio is not a constant factor in living 0.81 g NaCl and 0.6 g KH,PO, are dissolved in distilled cells; neither is the cell volume to cell carbon ratio. water. After boiling and cooling, the pH is adjusted to There are individual (Laws & Wong 1978), species7.2 using NaOH. To stain the NLPOM (or rather its specific (Chan 1978), diurnal (Laws & Wong 1978), and proteins), 10 m1 of this solution is added to a sample of possibly geographical and seasonal variations. Since about 100 ml. After 5 min the mixture is filtered on a 47 the ATP-content of a cell is influenced by the phymm Whatman GF/C glassfiber filter which is aftersiological condition of the cell, the ATP to carbon ratio wards rinsed with filtered seawater. The filters may is variable as well (Mel'nikov 1976). All these probthen be preserved in a freezer in a Millipore Petrislide lems and drawbacks make the calculated Living Car(47 mm). bon, and therefore also the NLPOM data, rather impreFor determination of total NLPOM surface area, the cise. To compound the problem, the assumption that outline of each particle is drawn using a light microNLPOM equals TPOM minus chlorophyll-related C is scope with a camera lucida. Calculation of the surface not always justified. areas is performed using an Apple I1 graphics tablet, For this reason, we here propose a new method coupled to an Apple I1 microcomputer. The program involving the vital stain Trypan Blue. This dye makes which we used not only calculates the surface area of it possible to distinguish between living and dead the particles, but also the equivalent circular diameter particulate organic matter. Though the method does and, furthermore, produces histograms of surface and not by itself yield a quantitative measure of NLPOM in diameter distributions. terms of carbon, an empirical conversion factor is For determination of chlorophyll a content, replicate Q Inter-Research/Printed in F. R. Germany 108 Mar. Ecol. Prog Ser. 25: 107-109, 1985 samples were filtered on Whatman GF/C glassfiber filters. Chlorophyll was extracted with 90% acetone. After centrifugation, the extract was measured spectrophotometrically. Calculations were made using the Strickland & Parsons (1968) formula. Total Particulate Organic Carbon (TPOC) was measured with a Coulomat 701 Carbon Analyser. The total NLPOM surface area is used as an indirect measure of the NLPOM-carbon content. This measure, together with chlorophyll a and TPOC, may be fed into a multiple linear regression program with TPOC as the dependent variable. This produces a regression formula of the form: TPOC = constant + A (chlorophyll a) + B (NLPOM) (1) where B (NLPOId) = NLPOM carbon of interest. Using this formula, one also obtains an empirical estimate of the specific carbon content of the phytoplankton, viz. the A-factor. When there is no zooplankton present, the constant should theoretically equal zero. As will be seen in the results, however, this is not always true.

Linking published scientific results with the data on which they are based has been a growing trend. In some disciplines, such as molecular biology, journals require submission of data to a recognized data center as a condition for publication of the associated article. Data centers, government agencies, and journals have been seeking new ways to link publications and data. The push for transparency of science is also moving most fields of science in this direction. The benefits of publishing data and standardizing their provenance have been documented in several locations [European Union, 2010; Ball and Duke, 2012].

The International conference on Marine Biodiversity Data management ‘Ocean Biodiversity Informatics’ was held in Hamburg, Germany, from 29 November to 1 December 2004. Its objective was to offer a forum to marine biological data managers to discuss the state of the field, and to exchange ideas on how to further develop marine biological data systems. Many marine biologists are actively gathering knowledge, as they have been doing for a long time. What is new is that many of these scientists are willing to share their knowledge, including basic data, with others over the Internet. Our challenge now is to try and manage this trend, avoid confusing users with a multitude of contradicting sources of information, and make sure different data systems can be and are effectively integrated. Supported by IOC for UNESCO and VLIZ (Flanders Marine Institute) Document available in English. Published