Title: Mid-Atlantic MBON: Dynamic Biodiversity and Telemetry Data for a Changing Coast
Funding Agency: NOAA
Project Lead: Hugh Roarty
Partners: MARACOOS https://maracoos.org
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center https://serc.si.edu/staff/matthew-ogburn/ogburnm11212011
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science https://www.umces.edu/david-secor
Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University https://www.jhuapl.edu/about/people/peter-thielen
Period of Performance: September 2024 – August 2028
Total Budget: $177,000
Project Summary:
Marine life in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region provides critical ecosystem functions and supports key economic drivers including fisheries and recreational activities. The coastal ocean is also rapidly changing due to human activities such as climate change and offshore energy development. Warming waters and infrastructure construction will reshape habitats and communities and are also expected to affect long-term biodiversity data such as those from NMFS trawl and aerial
surveys. Understanding these changes in biodiversity and developing the monitoring programs of the future will require data integration across existing and emerging biological and oceanographic sensors and platforms and development of new tools for interacting with, visualizing, and accessing data.
We propose to address this MBON/ATN need by integrating cutting edge biological (e.g. environmental DNA [eDNA], telemetry, passive acoustics) information with traditional MARACOOS strengths in ocean observing (e.g. High Frequency (HF) radar, gliders, satellites, models), leading to the development of new data products, analytical tools, and information resources supporting ocean and coastal management in the Mid-Atlantic region. Rapid advances in sequence-based monitoring indicate that eDNA approaches have the potential to become standard ocean observing tools that can be operationalized for environmental management within the period of the proposed project. Similarly, animal telemetry and bioacoustics provide new
insights into species distributions, habitat use, migration pathways, and phenology with unprecedented spatial and temporal coverage, and offer novel opportunities for validating and augmenting eDNA data. Integrating biological data with existing MARACOOS data such as surface currents, ocean color, glider data, and models will further expand opportunities for detecting, understanding, predicting, and managing biodiversity.