Integration of Sustained Observations in the Marine Environment

Oceans 2025 Theme 10

The marine environment is large in scale, highly dynamic and relatively inaccessible - requiring sustained observations to obtain meaningful information on environmental changes and their causes. This Theme is a NERC Category 1 activity that provides the infrastructure and scientific coordination to support many well-established marine time series and monitoring studies, together with others specifically designed to meet the needs of Oceans 2025.

The Sustained Observations (SOs) proposed here span all marine domains from the sea-shore to the global ocean, providing data and knowledge on a wide range of ecosystem properties and processes (from ocean circulation to biodiversity) that are critical to understanding Earth system behaviour and identifying change. They have been developed not merely to provide long-term data sets, but to capture extreme or episodic events, and play a key role in the initialisation and validation of models. Many of these SOs will be integrated into the newly developing UK Marine Monitoring Strategy - evolving from the Defra reports Safeguarding our Seas (2002) and Charting Progress (2005), thus contributing to the underpinning knowledge for national marine stewardship. They will also contribute to the UK GOOS Strategic Plan (IACMST, 2006) and the Global Marine Assessment.

The sustained observations are shown in the figure above