Introducing a Research Coordination Network for the Ross Sea region Marine Protected Area
To fulfill their conservation potential and provide safeguards for biodiversity, marine protected areas (MPAs) need coordinated research and monitoring for informed management through effective evaluation of ecosystem dynamics. However, coordination is challenging, often due to knowledge gaps caused by inadequate access to data and resources, compounded by insufficient communication between scientists and managers. We are using the world’s largest MPA in the Ross Sea, Antarctica as a model system to create an international interdisciplinary network supporting research and monitoring that could be implemented in other remote, large-scale international MPAs.
To formalize this network, we have received funding from the United States National Science Foundation to build a Research Coordination Network which will support research, monitoring, and science/policy integration in large-scale remote international MPAs using the Ross Sea region MPA as a model system. The Research Coordination Network intends to network three key components: (i) policy engagement, (ii) community partner engagement, and (iii) integrated science comprising three themes: data science and cyberinfrastructure; biophysical modeling; and observations that include monitoring and process studies.
In 2027, the Ross Sea region MPA will have its first 10-year review, presenting a critical opportunity to coordinate across the science, policy, and other partner communities to ensure the 2027 review (and subsequent reviews) are well grounded in robust scientific data, analyses, and streamlined inputs into policy. Notably, many Antarctic research, policy and conservation groups exist, some are even already focused on the Ross Sea, but there is not yet a formalized framework for coordination. Hence, the need for a Research Coordination Network which can formalize connections between policy, research, and other communities focused specifically on research and monitoring of the Ross Sea region MPA.
Through this Network, we seek to provide an example of how to bring together diverse interdisciplinary participants towards an effective, integrated science-policy collaboration. We envision that this proposed Research Coordination Network can improve MPA implementation by generating policy-relevant science, which can in turn improve MPA effectiveness in the Ross Sea and beyond.
The scientific community has addressed multidisciplinary studies of the Earth System, to which this proposal is aligned. Therefore, the ATMOS 2 team is concerned with understanding the relationships between the components of the Antarctic and South American climates, their local processes, their variability, and teleconnections.
The study on a climatic and global scale is carried out through the observation of the operating climate modes (variability) that link Antarctica and the Southern Ocean to Brazil, through teleconnections. On a regional and weather scale, the coupled components of the oceanic and atmospheric systems operating in South America and Antarctica will be studied. On a local scale, campaigns will be carried out to collect in situ data, seeking to understand the local processes that are relevant and possible relationships with larger (temporal and spatial) scales. Always having as a guideline, deepening knowledge about the climate of Antarctica and its influences on the climate of Brazil, following the science advocated in the Decennial Plan for Antarctic Science in Brazil (2023-2032). The air-sea fluxes of heat, momentum and gases in the Southern Ocean have a direct impact, in time scales ranging from short to the climatic ones, on other processes occurring in this ocean and in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is expected, through the development of this project, to articulate and train a multidisciplinary team capable of advancing in the understanding of the modes of oceanic, atmospheric and cryosphere variability, their associated processes, and the possible eventual impacts on the climate of Brazil and South America. A range of techniques will be used, involving in situ data collected in the ocean and atmosphere, coupled Earth System models and reanalysis datasets.
One of the great challenges of ATMOS 2 will be to make use of new in situ observations of air-sea fluxes together with past observations integrated with initiatives such as the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS) always keeping in mind to improve and/or develop new parameterizations of these quantities for use in numerical models. This next summer 2024/25 ATMOS 2 will be on its first-year field work. Below are some illustrative figures that show some of the activities carried out in fieldwork led by LOA during ATMOS.
http://www.rosssearesearch.org
