Australian mooring network – a global blueprint for coastal ocean observing

CSIRO technicians Clare Davies and Ryan Crossing prepare bottles to collect water samples at Ningaloo in Western Australia. Image credit: T.P. Lynch, CSIRO.

A network of nine National Reference Stations deployed by Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) is providing the latest physical, chemical and biological information to help scientists and industry understand our coastal seas.

The network of National Reference Stations is described for the first time today in a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0113652.

Lead author, Dr Tim Lynch from CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship, says “Scientists have already been able to use the IMOS data to observe extreme events, such as marine heat waves and coastal flooding and rare events such as plankton blooms.”

IMOS has implemented the network of reference study sites to build on three long-term locations where monthly water sampling commenced in the 1940s and 1950s.

The modern network adds in-situ moorings and enhanced monthly water sampling to collect more than 50 data streams, some in near real time. Building on sampling for temperature, salinity, and nutrients, the network now observes dissolved oxygen, carbon, turbidity, currents, chlorophyll a, phytoplankton and zooplankton. Additional information to understand ocean acidification and bio-optics are also collected at a subset of the sites. All of the data are made freely and publically available via the IMOS Ocean Portal https://imos.aodn.org.au.

“Sustained observations allow us to track changes in ocean and marine ecosystems, however until IMOS these have been rare in the Southern Hemisphere,” says Dr Lynch.

“For the first time in Australia, we have combined forces across our various marine institutes and research organisations to build a continent-wide sampling of our coastal seas and ecosystems, so we can continuously track and understand variation at daily, seasonal and annual time scales.”

IMOS Director, Tim Moltmann says, “Australia’s large ocean territory provides massive social, economic and environmental benefits to our nation.”

“However we haven’t been very good at sustaining marine observing programs over the years, making it difficult to distinguish things like short-term variability and longterm change,” says Tim Moltmann.

“IMOS has overcome this problem by putting in place a single national collaborative system, made possible by core funding by the Australian Government, to deliver efficient and effective marine observing and data management on an ongoing basis. The National Reference Station network is an excellent example.”

IMOS is a national collaborative research infrastructure, supported by Australian Government. It is led by University of Tasmania in partnership with the Australian marine and climate science community.
Dr Tim Lynch, Tim Moltmann, Marian Wiltshire