SUMMARY
Marine ecosystems are complex and highly variable networks of interacting organisms that support
roughly half of global productivity and play important roles in sustaining global processes, including
regulation of climate. The lower trophic levels include key primary producers at the base of the food web,
as well as bacteria and a variety of small grazers that turn over rapidly and efficiently recycle carbon and
nutrients and provide links that transfer energy to higher trophic levels, such as fish, seabirds, and marine
mammals, helping to maintain healthy and productive ecosystems. Mounting recognition points to the
societal value of not just timely information about the status and change of this biodiversity in marine
systems but how well can we model and predict them. While existing and emerging observation systems
are poised to contribute to this need, there is a large need for computational-enabled marine biodiversity
data and information systems. The research proposed here will bring together computational and
information scientists, oceanographers and microbiologists to develop a Marine Biodiversity Virtual
Laboratory (MBVL). Most important is the identification and embedding of the required application,
integration and analytic modeling tools into next generation data frameworks and the dissemination of
these ready-to-use capabilities into the larger marine biodiversity informatics communities. The MBVL
will enable transformative access to and integration of ocean observations to produce novel science
insights into marine ecosystems and the services they provide. The approach will address large scale,
heterogeneous data challenges with informatics solutions that enable the cyber-generation and
documentation of biodiversity indicators, providing the traceability between data and information to be
used as a basis for sustainable ecosystem-based management and needed policy decisions.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT
Sustaining the health and services provided by marine ecosystems has high societal value, and
biodiversity is an important metric. Although focused on indicator and model-based characterization of
biodiversity data for the base of the food web, project outcomes will include a cyber-enabled, scalable,
open-source, standards-based framework that can be applied to biodiversity data from any ecosystem.
Furthermore, the Virtual Lab concept, where function is determined by specific scientific and application
use cases, will drive an intellectual and technical exchange across boundaries of expertise within and
beyond oceanography. This will meet the real cyber-challenges today, which lie in bringing crossdisciplinary interactions with computational, computer, and information scientists to embed the analytic
tools into a marine biodiversity data framework. More importantly will be the ability to, in a routine
manner, move beyond characterizing the biodiversity and detecting patterns of change, to modeling and
predicting biodiversity while exploring the functional aspects of diverse populations in marine
ecosystems. The opportunity to advance biodiversity knowledge via harnessing and integrating key data
and information resources cannot be overstated. At the same time, it will set the stage for similar
advances in other cross-disciplinary arenas.
BROADER IMPACTS
Direct economic value is associated with relatively few species that are harvested for food or other natural
resources, but the sustainability of marine ecosystems and their many services depend critically on a
much wider diversity of life forms that support stability, resilience, and ultimately productivity. Despite
the fact that the US, Europe, and other nations have focused fisheries management on the resource itself,
the vast majority of biomass and metabolic activity helping to sustain these resources is associated with
microscopic plankton. Management emphasis is now shifting to embrace strategies that are founded in
integrated ecosystem assessments that include biodiversity indicators. The proposed research will have
impacts beyond ocean sciences, i.e. more broadly in management and policymaking regarding marine
resources and ecosystem services. Included is the traceability and explainability (and perhaps sensitivity)
of indicators to their formulation and underlying data constraints. Additional broader impacts of the
proposed research include advancing a next-generation workforce, specifically graduate students and
community members engaged to think and act at the system-level; working integratively to promote
sustainability through well-tested models; and links with fisheries managers via collaborations external to
this project and industry partners to evaluate and disseminate solutions to a wide user base.
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