Smithsonian MarineGEO: Understanding Biodiversity of Coastal Oceans Across the Globe

The health of our oceans is continually threatened:  locally by overfishing, pollution, habitat loss and invasive species; globally by warming and ocean acidification. Yet our ability to track biological changes in marine ecosystems is severely hampered by the absence of standardized observations and experiments, particularly in the coastal ocean where the changes are and will continue to be most dramatic.  In biodiversity assessments, different personnel and different methodologies make it impossible to compare the results of studies done at different times and different places. Indeed, almost all assays focus on the physical and chemical characteristics of seawater, with the biological assessments being restricted to easy to measure attributes such as chlorophyll.  Those more detailed investigations that do occur are typically limited in geographic extent.  The launch of MarineGEO responds to this need by establishing a network of coastal observatories that employ techniques ranging from archeology to molecular genetics. Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) monitor the recruitment of marine organisms using bar-coding and next-generation sequencing techniques.  Standardized coring methodologies to characterize centuries-old deposits permit the establishment of global baselines.   These and a variety of other methods are being applied in identical fashion to compare the function of coastal marine ecosystems across latitude and longitude and through time.