Log | School News
Nicholas School Researchers Awarded $1.8 Million To Develop
Marine Animal Digital Archive
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 $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 for 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, to 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 got under way this summer, when Nicholas
School researchers started working 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.
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