Life in the ocean is the focus for the major new EU project BioEcoOcean

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Life in the ocean is the focus for the major new EU project BioEcoOcean. One main task will be developing a working method for supporting the development and coordination of ocean observations and measurements to make them comparable from one country, research group and management agency to the next. The project will last four years and has a budget of SEK 67.5 million.

“Today, marine organisms are observed and monitored in various ways around the world. Nor is there any well-developed overall strategy for doing so,” says Lina Mtwana Nordlund, who is coordinating the project from Uppsala University.

The lack of standardised methods makes it difficult to unequivocally answer questions about how organisms and ecosystems are responding to, for example, climate change.

“I work a great deal with seagrass. But what should I be measuring? Someone might measure coverage – i.e., how large an area the plants cover – another how many plants there are and a third something else entirely. Globally standardised and coordinated measurements will allow us to compare our measurements with one another wherever one is on Earth, as one does with temperature for example,” explains Nordlund.

Development of a tool

The main task of the project, which is part of the European Commission’s key funding programme for research and innovation, Horizon Europe, will be to build a system that facilitates equivalent and more useful marine observations. Work will begin in earnest in early 2024.

Read the full article here: A tool to increase the utility of ocean observations.