Oral Presentation Australian Society for Fish Biology Conference 2017

Measuring and understanding change: IMOS initiatives and tools relevant to fish and fisheries (#16)

Ana Lara-Lopez 1 , Tim Moltmann 1 , Roger Proctor 1
  1. University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia

Changes in our marine environment are underway with increasing temperature, ocean acidification and deoxygenation affecting marine ecosystems. Monitoring has become particularly important in order to detect and help predict change, and Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) aims to address this need by providing the infrastructure to observe our oceans. As a marine observing system, IMOS has focused on building long-term time-series data, making all data openly available, thus ensuring IMOS observations are available for use by many stakeholders. The richness of these data streams has also enabled the creation of new initiatives of interest to the fish biology and fisheries community, such as:

  • National Ichthyoplankton Monitoring and Observing (NIMO), which evaluates the value of long-term monitoring of ichthyoplankton at selected IMOS National Reference Stations;
  • Zooplankton Ocean Observations and Modelling (ZOOM), which is beginning the process of systematically integrating zooplankton observations into biological and ecosystem models;
  • Synthesis and national scale analysis of IMOS acoustic telemetry data, which is developing a national approach to synthesis and analysis of IMOS Animal Tracking Facility data.
  • The Marine Sciences Cloud which will provide a virtual desktop support for marine and climate scientists to run analyses using a suite of online graphical and scripting tools and a national service to annotate and analyse underwater imagery (AUV and BRUVS) by leveraging existing software initiatives.
  • Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) forecasting initiative, which is exploring the possibility of creating a forecasting system for HABs to help fisheries and aquaculture

In addition to IMOS-led initiatives, IMOS data has contributed to the validation of a diversity of ocean models, including the ETAS model, used to study marine heatwaves along the east coast of Tasmania.

This talk will illustrate how these initiatives are contributing to measuring and understanding changes which impact on Australian fish ecology.