The conundrum of marine environmental indicators: The argument for new marine sensor technology

Abstract

The last decade has seen a step change in our efforts to monitor the state of the worlds’ oceans. This has at least partly been driven by a need to better understand the role of the oceans in climatological processes. This unmet need also stimulated the development of an array of new technology; principally in the form of unmanned floats and gliders and more comprehensive fixed mooring array systems. This instrumentation has underpinned the delivery of time series of data that are used to update a suite of indicators. However, despite the step change in observing efforts, the vast majority of this effort has been directed towards the monitoring and indicators of physical processes in the oceans. Although these physical processes play a central role in global climate dynamics, from a marine resource and systems management perspective the key ecosystem goods and services are mostly biological in nature. It is therefore argued here that despite the recent advances in efforts to observe the marine environment, there remains a large unmet need in monitoring and observing, and hence establishing time series of indicators of the key biological and ecological stocks, flows and processes in the oceans.