She et al.
Integrated Coastal and Biological Observing
Frontiers In Marine Science | www.frontlersln.org
2
July 2019 | Volume 6 | Article 314
INTRODUCTION
The coastal ocean is the water body from the shelf-break
to the shore, including estuary waters. Presently about 40%
of the world’s population live within 100 km of the coast.
Anthropogenic activities within the watershed and the newly
emerging maritime economy initiatives severely affect the coastal
water. Monitoring of the coastal seas, therefore, becomes essential
in providing marine information services for the maritime
economy, for protection of marine environment and ecosystems
and for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Coastal ocean
observing has been developed in either national or regional level
in the past decades, e.g., in Europe, United States, Australia,
Japan, and China. Several papers or books discuss integrated and
global observing systems (Malone and Cole, 2000; Babin et al.,
2008; Liu et al., 2015). Early coastal monitoring components
were designed to fit for specific purposes, e.g., operational
applications, climate monitoring, environmental assessment, or
fishery management. The monitoring activities were also carried
out by different sectors with specific governmental mandates.
In the last decade, integrated coastal ocean observing systems
have been designed and developed to fit for multiple purposes.
The US IOOS (Integrated Ocean Observing System) is a
national observing infrastructure to cover the coastal shelf sea
waters of the United States, managed by several regions. The
IOOS was designed to provide data to support multi-purpose
applications, ranging from operational services, climate change
adaptation, maritime economy to ecosystem-based management,
with a timely, operational data delivery (Corredor, 2018). In
Australia, the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS, Hill
et al., 2009) is similar to the United States system but was
designed as a research infrastructure. Since major data streams
of IMOS are delivered timely, they are also useful for operational
forecasting and management of marine natural resources, etc.
An important feature of both IOOS and IMOS is that they
were built upon modern technologies e.g., gliders, high frequency
radars, and animal borne instruments which have been identified
as emerging technologies for future GOOS (Global Ocean
Observing System) coastal and biological observing (Moltmann
et al., 2019). In Europe, the European Regional Operational
Oceanography Systems (ROOSs) also have integrated these
technologies. In addition, ferrybox and shallow water Argo
profilers are extensively used (She, 2018; Le-Traon et al.,
2019). The ROOS observations were designed for operational
oceanography, but can also be used for almost all other purposes,
due to their operational online delivery, open and free access.
There are significant efforts in integrating the ocean observing in
the operational oceanography community. In the coastal ocean,
the future integration aims to improve the cost-effectiveness and
support the development of operational ecology (She et al., 2016)
and seamless modeling (forecasting, reanalysis, and projection).
However, there are significant gaps in observations and
cost-effectiveness in the existing online monitoring programs.
On the other hand, there is already a significant amount of
coastal and biological observations being collected for supporting
ecosystem-based management and climate change adaptation
and mitigation, as is coordinated by ICES (International Centre
for Exploring the Sea) for fishery and regional conventions
for environmental assessment in Europe and National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries in the United States.
However, most of the data are delivered offline which do not fit
the operational needs. There is an urgent need to integrate the
online and offline monitoring programs to fill the observational
and technological gaps. Instead of giving a comprehensive review
of the existing coastal and biological observing, this paper aims at
categorizing the “integrated observing” and how the existing gaps
in coastal and biological observations can be filled through the
integration. The integration discussed in this paper is at the scale
of a regional sea basin, surrounded by one or more countries.
INTEGRATED COASTAL OCEAN
OBSERVING
The integrated observing can be divided into three categories: fitfor-purpose
integration, parameter integration, and instrumental
integration, which addresses three stages of marine data value
chain - observing, data management, and data usage. The fit-forpurpose
integration is to integrate ocean observing from multiple
sectors so that the observations can be measured for multiple
purposes with improved data adequacy and cost-effectiveness.
The parameter integration brings marine data of all parameters
from air, water, biota, seabed to human activities together
and makes them timely accessible. For the final data usage,
the instrumental integration will produce the best monitoring
products through integrating different monitoring components,
e.g., in situ observations, remote sensing, and modeling. The
three kinds of integration are illustrated in Figure 1. In order to
maximize the value of the observing system, it is essential that the
three kinds of integration are all addressed.
Fit-for-Purpose Integration
According to its purpose, ocean observing can be divided
into governmental, research, and commercial activities. The
governmental activity covers operational, environmental, fishery,
and hydrological sectors. For a given sector, the observing is
often coordinated at the regional sea scale via an “observational
network” consisting of governmental agencies from different
countries and/or regions, such as ROOSs and Northeast Pacific
cooperation (Barth et al., 2019). Through enhanced coordination
and integration among different governmental observing
networks, research and commercial observing programs, the
fit-for-purpose integration aims at filling the observation gaps
and improving cost-effectiveness.
The multi-network integration can be implemented in
three stages: first, a fit-for-purpose assessment on data
adequacy, appropriateness, and cost-effectiveness of the existing
observational networks has to be carried out to identify the
gaps. In Europe, the data adequacy assessment has been carried
out by the EMODnet (European Marine Observational Data
network) Sea Basin Checkpoint projects for eleven social-benefit
areas (Miguez et al., 2019). Second, the harmonized sampling
scheme should be designed to fill the gaps for all purposes. For
example, through improvement of near real time delivery of
