AsianScientist (Sep. 19, 2014) – To gain a better understanding of marine life and its environment, scientists at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have embarked on a pilot project to crowd-source the collection of oceanographic data globally. The first findings have been published PLOS Biology.
While much attention is placed on mammals and fish in the sea, it is the tiny marine microbes that support the nutrient cycle and form the foundation of the food web. Known collectively as the marine microbiome, they are the most abundant organisms in the ocean but also the least understood.
Mapping all the oceans on Earth to better understand such organisms would require almost half a dozen scientific vessels embarking on expeditions for over two and a half years, with costs totaling upwards of US$300 million. This would still not yield any data from higher and lower latitudes or remote areas such as the Indian Ocean.
NTU Associate Professor Federico Lauro sought to use crowd-sourcing to make such expeditions more economic and productive, leading a team of scientists from twelve international universities on a four month long expedition across the Indian Ocean. During this four month expedition, the team collected oceanographic data and hundreds of biological samples containing invaluable data on bacteria, plankton and other marine microbiomes.
According to the scientists, these samples provide a more complete picture of the health of the Indian Ocean and its environmental conditions.
Captained by Prof. Lauro, who was a national sailing champion in Australia and his homeland of Italy, the vessel—a privately-owned 18.5 meter-long Nautor Swan yacht—started her 6,500 nautical mile (12,000 km) journey in Cape Town, South Africa, sailing up to Sri Lanka before coming down the Straits of Malacca to Singapore. The expedition cost US$75,000 in total.
“The ocean samples we collected will allow us to sequence the genes and genomes of the microbial population in the ocean, some of which were previously unknown to us,” said Prof. Lauro, who holds a concurrent appointment at the University of New South Wales.
The scientists believe that the data collected from such expeditions will enable an analysis of the the role the microbial population plays in ocean geochemistry and the development of advanced ocean health models. Such models could be used to predict the spread of toxins or pathogens and even the spread of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
An automated device is now being developed to allow ‘citizen scientists’ to volunteer in the project. Such ‘citizen scientists’ could be recreational sailors who are not scientifically trained, but the device—a rugged box containing all the instrumentation needed to collect biological samples and to measure physical parameters like temperature, conductivity and depth, as well as weather conditions—will make it easier for them to join the crowd sourced oceanography effort.
The article can be found at: Lauro et al. (2014) The Common Oceanographer: Crowdsourcing the Collection of Oceanographic Data.
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Source: Nanyang Technological University.
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