Google Ocean Net Surfers Will Benefit From Work of Two St. Andrews Scientists
Filed under: Census of Marine Life,Discovery,News & Resources,Press Releases
Gerhard Pohle, right, of the Huntsman Marine Science Centre, takes samples on the shores of Senegal in West Africa.
From the Telegraph-Journal
ST. ANDREWS – The next time you log onto Google Ocean, a new Google Earth feature, you might benefit from the work of two St. Andrews scientists.Google Ocean, launched in February, allows users to dive under the water – in the virtual world – to see the ocean floor and watch videos related to marine life.
Google Ocean includes many references to the Census of Marine Life (COML). This 10-year project involves research scientists in 80 countries – including Gerhard Pohle and Lou Van Guelpen at the Atlantic Reference Centre, part of the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in St. Andrews.
COML, a project to assess and explain the diversity, distribution and abundance of life in the oceans, will wrap up next year with an event in London, Pohle said in an interview.
The 17 components of COML include the Natural Geography In Shore Areas (NaGISA) project. The Huntsman hosts the Atlantic Ocean part of NaGISA, overseeing sampling sites in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Maine and Senegal, west Africa.
Pohle and Van Guelpen head up the project locally.
“It really has brought marine scientists together around the world,” Pohle said. “You have to put the pieces together in order to understand the big picture.”
Pohle and Van Guelpen have responsibility for the Atlantic Ocean segment.
In addition to his work on the Atlantic section of NaGISA, Pohle is preparing the COML chapter on crustaceans around the world.
He and Van Guelpen also work with American partners on a list of species in the Gulf of Maine, part of the COML regional ecosystems work under the Gulf of Maine Area (GOMA) project.
Together with Thomas Trott at Suffolk University in Boston, they maintain monitoring sites on both sides of the Canada-United States border in Passamaquoddy Bay and Coobscook Bay.
“As far as I’m concerned, it is the first truly global marine science initiative,” Pohle said.
He submits data on the Atlantic Ocean to NaGISA heaquarters in Fairbanks, Alaska, which reports to COML headquarters in Washington, D.C.
At monitoring stations around the world, scientists, students and others count essentially everything in plots one metre square, in more detail 50 centimetres square, and very fine detail 25 centimetres square.
Phole described the project as “trying to get a base line on what things are like in the census period – 2000 to 2010.
The project chose monitoring sites likely to be still undisturbed 10 years from now for a subsequent survey – the reason for selecting Kouchibouguac National Park and the Musquash marine protect area for monitoring sites.
“By next year we have to have all of the results written up,” Pohle said.
Different publications will come out of COML, online and on paper, including a children’s book and a movie.
“It’s really a very spectacular movie,” Pohle said, providing a view “of how precious ocean life is.”
You can Google Earth and the ocean portion of the project at http://earth.google.com/ocean
