Life in a Changing Ocean (LiCO), the successor to the Census of Marine Life, is being designed to ensure that discoveries made during the census are put to good use in policy and planning.

Professor Paul Snelgrove of the Ocean Science Centre, Memorial University of Newfoundland outlined the LiCO program at the Census of Marine Life Beyond 2010 Workshop at Aberdeen, UK, in September 2011. The workshop generated ideas and input to build a case for the community to invest in the LiCO initiative. The program has three themes: Discovery and Current Baselines; Defining Ecosystem Function and Services; and Observing, Understanding and Predicting Change, and aims to address global questions that cannot be answered by individual researchers or countries. It will provide opportunities for data sharing, networking and leveraging existing research and resources, as well as maintaining the global community of scientists that contributed to the first census: the Census of Marine Life. Dr Richard Brinkman (AIMS) co-leads the Observing, Understanding and Predicting Change theme.

The Census of Marine Life was released at London’s Royal Institute in October 2010 after 10 years of research and exploration by 2700 scientists from 80 nations: the largest marine scientific collaboration to date. The Australian launch was held at Parliament House in August 2011, hosted by the Oceans Policy Science Advisory Group. The event outlined Australia’s contribution to the census and its implications for Australian Government policy and planning. Speakers were Professor Ian Chubb (Australia’s Chief Scientist), Dr Ian Poiner (Chair of the Census Steering Committee), Professor Nic Bax (Chair of the Australian Census Committee) and Dr Jan Strugnell (La Trobe University), who described some of her research with the census in the Antarctic Oceans.

More than 160 Australian scientists were engaged in census research, including many from the CERF Marine Biodiversity Hub. They explored seamounts coral reefs, continental margins, Antarctica, genetics, tagging and information management, and turned up a shrimp thought to have been extinct for 50 million years. Australia reported the highest number of species: 33 000 catalogued, 17 000 awaiting names, and potentially 250 000 species in all (minus microbes) were tallied by CSIRO’s Dr Alan Butler and his team. Global marine biodiversity (minus microbes) could be as high as 10 or 30 million species.

A major legacy of the census is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System which hosts more than 800 datasets and nearly 30 million records. Other enduring census communities include the Ocean Tracking Network, the International Network for Scientific Investigation of Deep-sea Ecosystems and the Census of Coral Reef Ecosystems. Census data are now being used by the Global Oceans Biodiversity Initiative to support the Convention of Biodiversity as it identifies areas on the high seas beyond national jurisdiction that warrant special management attention.

And a community of scientists has emerged from the census with a desire to streamline the monitoring of marine life around the globe. I trust that the Life in a Changing Ocean program will facilitate this need and provide a further decade of exemplary marine research on how life in our oceans functions and adapts.

Professor Nic Bax
Director, NERP Marine Biodiversity Hub

Image:  Mars is melting, NASA website.  Photo: Thomas Williamson