Midway through the “Ocean Decade,” as declared by the United Nations, we face an unprecedented wealth of data documenting one of the universe’s most complex and mysterious environments. Satellites zoom over the ocean daily monitoring the ocean’s color and temperature. Autonomous robots trawl the sea taking samples and measurements. The sequencing revolution has produced massive amounts of genetic data on ocean-dwelling phytoplankton, single-celled organisms, and viruses.
What once was an information paucity now has become a glut, according to SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel Muratore. And that poses a new set of challenges to researchers studying how ocean changes affect us all.
Misinterpret the data, and you may face dangerous consequences: for fisheries and aquaculture, for beloved marine life like whales, and even for climate-change mitigation. “Phytoplankton contribute about as much carbon uptake and oxygen release as all plants on land combined,” says Muratore.
Aiming to shape how scientists worldwide use ocean data, Muratore is helping put together a working group on “A Changing Epistemology for a Changing Ocean: Outlining Priorities for Interdisciplinary, Collaborative, Biological Oceanography and Biogeochemistry,” to be held at SFI August 12–14.
Participants will propose top priorities for the next era of highly interdisciplinary ocean science.
The meeting will address questions such as, “How can you use sequencing data to understand, say, carbon drawdown or the release of nitrogen-bearing greenhouse gases?” Muratore says. “Then we want to collaborate with the ocean modelers who are trying to scale up individual observations across the ocean to estimate how those processes are working at the Earth level.”
Muratore, who is also a BioGeoSCAPES Fellow, is co-organizing the working group with others in the 2023–2024 cohort. These early-career ocean researchers from around the world receive funding from to foster international collaboration.
“These are researchers who will soon be making big decisions about long-term, international, high-resource scientific projects,” says Muratore. “By setting a bold agenda for the future of complex ocean data, we help ensure those efforts succeed — for the good of scientific knowledge and our planet.”
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No.2201571.