Citizen oceanographers wanted to monitor high seas

[Buster's Uncle]

Citizen oceanographers wanted to monitor high seas
AFP
6 hours ago



A New Zealand plane searches for missing flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean in April. Sailors are urged to become "citizen oceanographers" to help understand remote seas (AFP Photo/Greg Wood)



Researchers Wednesday urged sailors to become "citizen oceanographers" and help scientists better understand some of the world's wildest seas where ships and even planes disappear without trace.

An Australian-led study said that despite technology such as GPS navigation and advanced research vessels with modern capabilities, much of the world's oceans remains under-explored, with cost a key impediment to knowing more.

"Notwithstanding satellite constellations, autonomous vehicles, and more than 300 research vessels worldwide, we lack fundamental data relating to our oceans," said the study published in the journal PLoS Biology.

"These missing data hamper our ability to make basic predictions about ocean weather, narrow the trajectories of floating objects, or estimate the impact of ocean acidification and other physical, biological, and chemical characteristics of the world's oceans."

The lack of knowledge has been evident most recently in the fruitless hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which is believed to have crashed in the largely unmapped southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia six months ago.

"Even a modern jetliner can disappear in the ocean with little or no trace, and the current costs and uncertainty associated with search and rescue make the prospects of finding an object in the middle of the ocean daunting," it said.



A file photo shows US Navy operators searching for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean in April 2014 (AFP Photo/)


Federico Lauro, a University of New South Wales microbiologist and national sailing champion who led the study, said cost was a key factor in better understanding oceans.

But there was a large pool of sailors who could contribute cheaply, using small instruments fitted to yachts at a fraction of the cost of running specialised research vessels.

"The world's oceans are largely unexplored and we have a shortage of oceanographic data because it is financially and logistically impractical for scientists to sample such vast areas," he said.

"But with the right equipment, citizen scientists could gather large quantities of information as they sail around the world."


- 'Citizen science' -

Lauro last year led a scientific expedition across the Indian Ocean aboard S/Y Indigo V, a 61-foot (18-metre) sailing yacht, to pioneer this method of data collection.

The expedition, involving researchers from institutions in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Denmark and the US, demonstrated that the cost-effective approach could work.

During the 6,500 nautical mile "proof of concept" voyage from South Africa to Singapore, the team regularly took measurements and collected samples of tiny marine microbes.

The four-month journey cost less than two days of ship-time aboard an oceanographic research vessel, which typically costs more than US$30,000 per day to operate, excluding the cost of scientists, engineers, and the research itself.

Lauro said the thousands of yachts at sea each year could form a global monitoring network, collecting temperature and conductivity measurements, monitoring the weather and recording sightings of debris.

They could also collect samples of the tiny marine microbes, including bacteria and plankton, that are the foundation of the food web and vital indicators of an ocean's health.

"By using what's known as 'citizen science', Indigo V Expeditions set out to prove that the concept of crowdsourcing oceanography can solve the great data collection bottleneck," said Lauro.


http://news.yahoo.com/citizen-oceanographers-wanted-monitor-high-seas-032114940.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Citizen-Scientists Can Help Save the Oceans While Sailing the Seas
Takepart.com
By Katharine Gammon | 2 hours ago



The ocean is vast—so huge that scientists struggle to collect adequate amounts of data on its health, even with the aid of satellites, autonomous robots, and networked buoys.

Now scientists are proposing a simple solution to the challenges of data-gathering on the seven seas: Ask sailors for help.

That would mean attaching cheap sampling instruments to sailboats, yachts, or cargo vessels. The data collected would help scientists craft more accurate climate change computer models, make more precise weather forecasts, or even find planes lost at sea.

“Our idea is to take the cheap instrumentation that’s already available and put them on sailboats that are already going out into the ocean,” said Joseph Grzymski, an associate research professor of computational biology and microbiology at Nevada's Desert Research Institute and co-author of the new paper, which was published in the journal PLoS Biology.

Grzymski said that most oceanographic research happens in the top 330 feet of the ocean, which is the most biologically dynamic part of the sea and the also has the most contact with the atmosphere.

Scientific research vessels carry complex machines to take deep samples and analyze them in real time, but such ships can cost about $30,000 a day to operate. Still, much can be learned from simple measurements, including sampling the bacteria that live in near the ocean’s surface, taking temperature measurements, and even monitoring debris.

The researchers are working to ruggedize and automate  an ocean sampling device so citizen-sailor-scientists can collect bacterioplankton samples.

They estimate the device will cost $1,500 or less. The scientists hope government funding will pay for shipping and analyzing the samples.

Grzymski imagines a fleet of sensor-enabled boats making commonly-sailed routes—like the so-called coconut milk run from the California to Tahiti—to help scientists understand microbes, which make up 90 percent of the ocean’s biomass.

 “The typical time scale of research is based on funding, so it’s difficult to go and sample over a month [long] period to understand the dynamics of the ebb and flow of these organisms as they grow and die off,” said Grzymski. 

And having sailors regularly collect samples could give scientists more insight into the impact of acidification as the oceans absorb ever-growing amounts of carbon dioxide.

Some sailors are already eager to help scientists, as Grzymski discovered when he sailed with a colleague from Cape Town, South Africa, to Phuket, Thailand as part of a pilot study of citizen oceanography.

He said that such data collaboration could also help sailors.

“We met people with an amazing connection to the sea, and if they’re captaining a sailboat or a cargo ship, they travel in any conditions—so it would help them to have better predictions of what the ocean is doing.”


http://news.yahoo.com/citizen-scientists-help-save-oceans-while-sailing-seas-150144054.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Citizen oceanographers wanted to monitor high seas
Relaxnews
3 hours ago



Researchers on September 10, 2014 urged sailors to become "citizen oceanographers" and help scientists better understand some of the world's wildest seas where ships and even planes disappear without trace.



Researchers Wednesday urged sailors to become "citizen oceanographers" and help scientists better understand some of the world's wildest seas where ships and even planes disappear without trace.

An Australian-led study said that despite technology such as GPS navigation and advanced research vessels with modern capabilities, much of the world's oceans remains under-explored, with cost a key impediment to knowing more.

"Notwithstanding satellite constellations, autonomous vehicles, and more than 300 research vessels worldwide, we lack fundamental data relating to our oceans," said the study published in the journal PLoS Biology.

"These missing data hamper our ability to make basic predictions about ocean weather, narrow the trajectories of floating objects, or estimate the impact of ocean acidification and other physical, biological, and chemical characteristics of the world's oceans."

The lack of knowledge has been evident most recently in the fruitless hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which is believed to have crashed in the largely unmapped southern Indian Ocean off Western Australia six months ago.

"Even a modern jetliner can disappear in the ocean with little or no trace, and the current costs and uncertainty associated with search and rescue make the prospects of finding an object in the middle of the ocean daunting," it said.

Federico Lauro, a University of New South Wales microbiologist and national sailing champion who led the study, said cost was a key factor in better understanding oceans.

But there was a large pool of sailors who could contribute cheaply, using small instruments fitted to yachts at a fraction of the cost of running specialised research vessels.

"The world's oceans are largely unexplored and we have a shortage of oceanographic data because it is financially and logistically impractical for scientists to sample such vast areas," he said.

"But with the right equipment, citizen scientists could gather large quantities of information as they sail around the world."


- 'Citizen science' -

Lauro last year led a scientific expedition across the Indian Ocean aboard S/Y Indigo V, a 61-foot (18-metre) sailing yacht, to pioneer this method of data collection.

The expedition, involving researchers from institutions in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Denmark and the US, demonstrated that the cost-effective approach could work.

During the 6,500 nautical mile "proof of concept" voyage from South Africa to Singapore, the team regularly took measurements and collected samples of tiny marine microbes.

The four-month journey cost less than two days of ship-time aboard an oceanographic research vessel, which typically costs more than US$30,000 per day to operate, excluding the cost of scientists, engineers, and the research itself.

Lauro said the thousands of yachts at sea each year could form a global monitoring network, collecting temperature and conductivity measurements, monitoring the weather and recording sightings of debris.

They could also collect samples of the tiny marine microbes, including bacteria and plankton, that are the foundation of the food web and vital indicators of an ocean's health.

"By using what's known as 'citizen science', Indigo V Expeditions set out to prove that the concept of crowdsourcing oceanography can solve the great data collection bottleneck," said Lauro.


http://news.yahoo.com/citizen-oceanographers-wanted-monitor-high-seas-200546829.html