During two inspiring sessions at the Arctic Science Summit Week 2023 in Vienna, Austria, the recently initiated Atlantic-Arctic Distributed Biological Observatory (DBO) community joined up with the teams from the pioneering Pacific DBO, and the two DBOs in formation for the Davis Strait and the East Siberian Sea.

Happy collaborators by the end of the Joint DBO Community meeting on February 20th (Back L-R: L.Gerke/GEOMAR, C.Lee/APL-UW, K.Frey/UClark, A.Nikolopoulos/NPI, A.Sundfjord/NPI. Front L-R: J.Nolan/EuroGOOS, M-N.Houssais/CNRS, M. Karcher/AWI, J.Cross/NOAA, C.Goethel/UMCES, A.Fransson/NPI, L.Cooper/UMCES, C.Ashjian/WHOI, M.Chierici/IMR, K.Azetsu-Scott/DFO, J.Grebmeier/UMCES, M.Bezem/UiB, M.Reigstad/UiT.) Photo: Michael Karcher 

The DBO Science session “Integrating knowledge from regional marine observatories to pan-Arctic perspectives” on February 21st was concluded with a lot of ‘food for thought’ provided by our panel; from left to right: Lee Cooper (UMCES), Marit Reigstad (UiT), Paul Wassmann (UiT), and Kumiko Azetsu-Scott (DFO). Photo: Michael Karcher/AWI

Through discussions and science presentations, the aim was to identify opportunities for jointly improving our observational capacity in the Arctic Ocean, and ways to build a pan-Arctic DBO system out of the regional systems.

Map of the Arctic Ocean with the four Distributed Biological Observatory systems; the Pacific Arctic (purple), Davis Strait (orange), Atlantic Arctic (yellow), and proposed East Siberian Sea (green) DBOs. Source: A-DBO

The DBO concept is based on an international and collaborative network of standard sampling stations in the different sectors of the Arctic Ocean, with the aim to improve our ability to detect changes in the marine environment and in the associated ecosystem responses. The approach is interdisciplinary and serves to better utilize the observational expertise and already ongoing efforts through strengthened connections between existing observational timeseries, increased opportunistic sampling, and increased cooperation on sampling and equipment in dedicated DBO locations. It is one of the contributions of Arctic PASSION to much needed improvement of international coordination and cooperation in Arctic observing system elements.

As leveraging mechanisms towards better connectivity between the networks we discussed the ideas of regular, all-DBO science symposia and a joint pan-Arctic DBO special issue for scientific publications. To begin with, we agreed to establish a common, all-DBO webpage making it more feasible to reach first-level information about any of the observatories (to be launched soon). We also agreed on repeating the success of our joint DBO days at the ASSW 2024 and the planning of these upcoming events will start shortly.

To follow the progress of the Atlantic-Arctic DBO within Arctic PASSION, please visit us at: https://arcticpassion.eu/adbo/.