Search

A wide range of platforms and systems constitute the current Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) including satellites, research vessels, floats, underwater gliders, fixed-point observatories, sea level stations, high frequency radar and uncrewed surface vehicles. The European Ocean Observing System (EOOS) is designed to align and integrate Europe’s ocean observing capacity, promote a systematic and collaborative approach to collecting information on the state and variability of our seas, and underpin sustainable management of the marine environment and its resources. EOOS attempts to link the currently disparate observing system components and promote novel technology and infrastructure development, standardization, open access to data, and capacity building. Within the framework of EOOS is the EU-funded EuroSea project, with the overall goal to consolidate an integrated interdisciplinary ocean-observing-system to deliver essential information for the wellbeing, blue growth and sustainable management of the ocean, based on the implementation and coordination of the different observing networks above-mentioned, being the Uncrewed Surface Vehicles (USV) technology one of the novelties in terms of network initiative attempting to engage existing and forthcoming actors from public and private sectors, to consolidate an international USV network under common standard operational procedures and regulatory framework in support to EOOS strategy., Peer Reviewed

Report on ASV-Network structure and roadmap Revised edition

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Loescher, H., Vargas, R., Mirtl, M., Morris, B., Pauw, J., Yu, X., Kutsch, W., Mabee, P., Tang, J., Ruddell, B., Pulsifer, P., Bäck, J., Zacharias, S., Grant, M., Feig, G., Zheng, L., Waldmann, C., & Genazzio, M. Building a global ecosystem research infrastructure to address global grand challenges for macrosystem ecology. Earth’s Future, 10(5), (2022): e2020EF001696, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020ef001696., The development of several large-, “continental”-scale ecosystem research infrastructures over recent decades has provided a unique opportunity in the history of ecological science. The Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (GERI) is an integrated network of analogous, but independent, site-based ecosystem research infrastructures (ERI) dedicated to better understand the function and change of indicator ecosystems across global biomes. Bringing together these ERIs, harmonizing their respective data and reducing uncertainties enables broader cross-continental ecological research. It will also enhance the research community capabilities to address current and anticipate future global scale ecological challenges. Moreover, increasing the international capabilities of these ERIs goes beyond their original design intent, and is an unexpected added value of these large national investments. Here, we identify specific global grand challenge areas and research trends to advance the ecological frontiers across continents that can be addressed through the federation of these cross-continental-scale ERIs., This manuscript is in part the product of several workshops and ongoing GERI development. The first workshop was the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) sponsored and entitled: “Towards a Global Ecosystem Observatory”, 5–7 March 2017, University of Queensland, Brisbane Australia. Another workshop was sponsored by Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and entitled: “Global Integrated Research Infrastructure component in Next Generation ILTER”, 17–20 April, 2018, South China Botanical Garden, Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, China. The National Science Foundation (NSF) supported two workshops. The first was entitled: ‘Building a Global Ecological Understanding’ held at the University of Delaware, Newark Delaware, 3–6 June, 2016 (NSF 1347883) and the second entitled: “Global Environmental Research Infrastructure (GERI) Planning Workshop”, held at NEON HQ, Boulder Colorado, 25–27 June 2019 (NSF 1917180). The authors wish to thank the workshop attendees for their thoughtful contributions. NEON is a project sponsored by the NSF and managed under cooperative support agreement (DBI-1029808) to Battelle.

Report on ASV-Network structure and roadmap

Settling marine aggregates, such as zooplankton fecal pellets and marine snow, transport organic matter from the surface ocean to the deep sea and are largely responsible for the ocean's sequestration of carbon. However, our understanding of the functioning of the biological pump and the distribution of particulate organic matter in the water column often hinge on limited bulk data from sediment traps, large volume filtration or instantaneous snap-shots from in situ optical systems that only see a small part of the particle and aggregate spectra. We evaluated the added value of combining different optical systems to detect a range of organic and inorganic particle types during a case-study in the Cape Blanc upwelling region. Laboratory calibrations showed that one camera system detected large organic aggregates well and in situ data showed that it correlated positively with fluorescence. The other camera was better at detecting small, mainly inorganic particles which were not seen by the first camera and correlated positively with turbidity. The combined deployments of the two optical systems together with fluorescence and turbidity sensors showed potentials for added insights into spatial (depth) and temporal (diurnal) particle dynamics. The case study exemplified the different efficiencies of two camera systems to detect particles of different types in marine waters. From this, the results highlighted the importance of discriminating between qualitative and quantitative ranges of imaging systems, in order to understand the quantitative range of sizes as well as types of particles detected by a given system. This is especially important when optical systems are used to estimate carbon fluxes and particulate organic matter distribution in the water column from vertical profiles of particle size-distribution and abundance.

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. Usin

Effective ocean and coastal data management are needed to manage marine ecosystem health. Past ocean and coastal data management systems were often very specific to a particular application and region, but this focused approach often lacks real-time data and sharing/interoperating capability. The challenge for the ocean observing community is to devise standards and practices that enable integration of data from sensors across devices, manufacturers, users, and domains to enable new types of applications and services that facilitate much more comprehensive understanding and analyses of marine ecosystem. A given kind of sensor may be deployed on various platforms such as floats, gliders or moorings, and thus must be integrated with different operation, and data management systems. Simplifying the integration process in existing or newly established observing systems would benefit system operators and is important for the broader application of diverse sensors. This paper describes a geospatial “sensor web” architecture developed by the “NeXOS” project for ocean and coastal data management, based on the concepts of spatial data infrastructure and the Sensor Web Enablement framework of the Open Geospatial Consortium. This approach reduces the effort to propagate data from deployed sensors to users. To support the realization of the proposed Next generation Ocean Sensors (NeXOS) architecture, hardware and software specifications for a Smart Electronic Interface for Sensors and Instruments (SEISI) are described. SEISI specifies small lower-power electronics, minimal operating system, and standards-basedresearch software to enable web-based sharing, discovery, exchange, and processing of sensor observations as well as operation of sensor devices. An experimental scenario is presented in which sensor data from a low-power glider with low-bandwidth intermittent satellite communications is integrated into the geospatial sensor web using the NeXOS architecture., Postprint (author's final draft)

This report is Deliverable 8.2 in the NeXOS project. It describes the efforts made in validating the new sensors systems developed in NeXOS, namely three different types of optical sensors, two types of acoustic sensors, sensors for fisheries and the new anti-fouling system. Additionally, data availability and timeliness though the Sensor Web Enablement software/hardware features, developed by NeXOS, was validated. The validations took place on different observation platforms operated by the NeXOS Consortium, under realistic user scenarios, in real sea conditions over a limited time. Validation serves as the final step before the demonstrations in Work Package 9. The systems described herein, were functionally and scientifically validated in the sea, however, not necessarily, where the demonstrations will take place. All systems passed the scientific validation criteria used in the NeXOS project. The results are presented in a template format in order for make overview and reporting easier.

Many changes are occurring in the physical, chemistry and biology processes of the ocean. Understanding how these changes are driven is an element of the key environmental descriptors identified by the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) with the ultimate goal being to protect the resource base upon which marine-related economic and social activities depend. The Directive furthers the ecosystem approach to the management of human activities having an impact on the marine environment, integrating the concepts of environmental protection and sustainable use. To meet these goals, in-situ data are necessary for comprehensive modeling and forecasting of ocean dynamics. Yet, collection of in-situ observations is inherently challenging from the perspective of both time and resources. This paper addresses a new generation of acoustic, optical and fishery in-situ sensors that address these challenges. These sensor systems are multifunctional (single sensor systems addressing several phenomena), can be deployed on a large majority of ocean monitoring systems from surface to the seafloor, and operate for long periods with less maintenance. In addition, at the system and user interface level, the publication of data uses processes and formats conforming to OGC SWE standards and consistent with global ocean observing initiatives and ocean modeling portals such as Copernicus marine environment monitoring services. During the last three years, NeXOS has achieved a number of milestones, providing ten new sensors along with important transverse capabilities for anti-fouling and data management. The optical sensors include monitoring of marine contaminants such as hydrocarbons and components of the carbon cycle. New sensor systems for passive acoustic measurements with extended dynamic range include internal post-processing of acoustic information to reduce communication loads. Two additional sensors (chlorophyll-a and oxygen) have been added to the RECOPESCA system t, Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)