Nicholas School Researchers Awarded $1.8 Million To Develop Marine Animal Digital Archive

DURHAM, N.C. -- Marine mammals, sea turtles and seabirds traverse vast portions of Earth's oceans, making it difficult for researchers studying them in different places to compare notes on their disparate populations. Such a lack of data coordination is why the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation have awarded researchers in Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences $1.8 million to develop a digital archive of marine mammal, sea turtle and seabird distribution and abundance. The archive will be part of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), which will provide unparalleled access through the Web to coordinate old and newly created research information. This meshing of various computer files worldwide will not only give scientists instant access to what is known about locations and numbers of given species worldwide, but such census counts will also be linked to what is known about the animals' local environments. "It will be an immensely powerful tool," said Andrew J. Read, Rachel Carson Assistant Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at Duke, who is leading the research team. "The power of the Web will make previously inaccessible databases available in a format that will allow researchers to put marine mammals, turtles, and birds in the context of other marine animals and oceanography. It will open new avenues of research on marine populations that couldn't have been done without OBIS. "It's tremendously exciting to bring together existing data from disparate sources from all over the world and make it available oceanography," added Read, a specialist in marine mammals. "There are many people out there collecting information on the distribution and abundance of sea turtles, marine mammals and seabirds, but it has not been coordinated in any fashion until now." OBIS is a component of the Census of Marine Life, a major international research program based in Washington, D.C. Other Web-based databases already have been created for OBIS on fish, marine mollusks, squid and other cephalopods. The marine mammals, seabirds and sea turtles project will be a joint effort of Nicholas School researchers at the Durham campus and at the Duke Marine Laboratory in Beaufort. Other principal investigators include Patrick N. Halpin, assistant professor of the practice of landscape ecology and a geospatial technologies specialist; Larry B. Crowder, the Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology and a specialist in sea turtles; and David Hyrenbach, an assistant research scientist and specialist in seabirds. Crowder and Hyrenback are based in Beaufort; Halpin is based in Durham. Halpin and his research assistants will concentrate on the technical challenges of making the information both compatible with other OBIS data sets and Web accessible so researchers can seamlessly access it for analyses, modeling and mapping. Right now, "a researcher or a member of the public might go to several nodes to gather all the data they need," he said. "They might have one node to find sea surface temperature, another for marine mammals and another for fishes." He and his group will work on a new Geographic Information System data model that will allow geographic information to be observed in four dimensions: latitude, longitude, depth and time. "Marine species move around," Halpin noted. "It is not as simple as mapping out forests or geological features that can be considered to be static. In a dynamic ocean, you have to account for the time domain." The project officially gets under way this summer, when Nicholas School researchers will work with outside groups and a scientific steering committee to map out the structure of the Web system and to determine how best to coordinate available data. The Beaufort team members already have identified partners to provide existing data sets on marine mammals, sea turtles and seabirds. Those partners include the National Marine Fisheries Service Laboratories in Woods Hole, Mass., and in Miami, Fla.; the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St. Andrews University in Scotland; Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia Wash.; and Allied Whale, the Marine Mammal Laboratory of the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.