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<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Nature </span></i><b><span
style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>541, </span></b><span
style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>10–11<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>(05 January
2017)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>doi:10.1038/541010a<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Tool
to divide water masses into precise categories can help in conservation
planning.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:#222222;letter-spacing:-.4pt'>3D ocean map tracks ecosystems in
unprecedented detail</span></b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";
color:#222222;letter-spacing:-.4pt'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=vcard><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><a
href="http://www.nature.com/news/3d-ocean-map-tracks-ecosystems-in-unprecedented-detail-1.21240?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20170105&spMailingID=53127731&spUserID=MjA1NTE2ODQxMAS2&spJobID=1080713024&spReportId=MTA4MDcxMzAyNAS2#auth-1"><span
style='color:windowtext;border:none windowtext 1.0pt;padding:0in'>Alexandra
Witze</span></a></span></span><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>03 January
2017<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><a
href="http://www.nature.com/news/3d-ocean-map-tracks-ecosystems-in-unprecedented-detail-1.21240?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20170105&spMailingID=53127731&spUserID=MjA1NTE2ODQxMAS2&spJobID=1080713024&spReportId=MTA4MDcxMzAyNAS2">http://www.nature.com/news/3d-ocean-map-tracks-ecosystems-in-unprecedented-detail-1.21240?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20170105&spMailingID=53127731&spUserID=MjA1NTE2ODQxMAS2&spJobID=1080713024&spReportId=MTA4MDcxMzAyNAS2</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Oceanographers
are carving up the world’s seas like the last of the holiday turkey. A
new 3D map sorts global water masses — from deep, frigid circumpolar
waters to the oxygen-starved Black Sea — into 37 categories.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The map groups
together marine regions of similar temperature, salinity, oxygen and nutrient
levels. It has been available for only a few months, and researchers are still
working through how they might use it. But its international team of developers
hopes that the map will help conservationists, government officials and others
to better understand the biogeography of the oceans and make decisions about
which areas to preserve. It could also serve as a data-rich baseline for
analysing future ocean changes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Many existing
systems also attempt to classify variations in the ocean, such as lists of
large marine ecosystems or the Longhurst biogeographical provinces that are
defined by the rate at which ocean life consumes carbon. But these are often
limited to surface or coastal ecosystems. The latest effort, known as the
ecological marine units (EMUs), is the most detailed attempt yet to cover the
global ocean in three dimensions.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>“What’s
often missing is all that’s between the surface of the ocean and the
ocean bottom,” says Dawn Wright, chief scientist of Esri, a geographic
information-systems company in Redlands, California, that helped to develop the
3D map. “That’s what our project will hopefully bring to the
table.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Esri launched a
web portal for the EMU data in September, and has been presenting the concept
at conferences since then. Wright described it on 16 December in San
Francisco, California, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>EMUs can help
to reveal why marine animals live where they do. In the eastern tropical
Pacific Ocean the mapping shows a complex interplay between oxygen-rich and
oxygen-poor waters. The boundary of the low-oxygen zone shifts towards the
surface in some spots and dips deeper in others. That variation affects the
locations of economically important tuna fisheries, says Patrick Halpin, a
marine ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
“It’s an interesting thing to look at in three dimensions, fairly
unique and gratifying.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Such data could
guide the United Nations’ effort to designate a series of ecologically or
biologically significant marine areas to focus future conservation efforts,
Halpin notes. Looking at the distribution of EMUs could help officials to
pinpoint the boundaries of those areas, or to make sure they are designating
enough waters to capture all the biogeographic diversity.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>And the South
African National Biodiversity Institute is interested in using EMUs to update
data on open-ocean and deep-sea habitats for the country’s next national
biodiversity assessment, due in 2019, says Heather Terrapon, a spatial analysis
coordinator at the institute in Cape Town. Nations that do not have the money
to gather their own data sets could use the free EMU data and visualizations to
manage their marine resources, says Peter Harris, a marine geologist at the
environmental information-management centre GRID-Arendal in Arendal, Norway.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;background:#ECECEC'><b><span
style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>“It’s like total world
domination in ecosystem mapping.”<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The creation of
the EMUs is the second step in a project that started with similar mapping on
land. The intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations asked Roger Sayre, an
ecologist at the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia, to lead a team to
categorize terrestrial ecosystems. The researchers, including some at Esri, combined
information on geology and vegetation to generate nearly 4,000
‘ecological land units’. One example might be warm, wet plains, on
metamorphic rock, with mostly deciduous forest.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Next, the team
moved their focus from land to the oceans. “It’s like total world
domination in ecosystem mapping,” says Sayre, who heads the EMU project
with Wright.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>They began with
52 million data points in the World Ocean Atlas maintained by the US
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These include information on
chemical and physical parameters gathered every 27 kilometres to create a
3D grid. The team added other data such as the shape of the sea floor and used
statistical techniques to group the results into categories.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The resulting
EMUs include the deep, very cold, low-oxygen waters that encompass roughly
one-quarter of the world’s oceans. Others are much smaller, such as the
upper waters of the Red Sea, or the dilute estuaries of several Northern
Hemisphere rivers.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>For now, the
EMU maps rely on data averaged over five decades. Looking at conditions over
shorter periods of time, such as seasons, would provide more helpful detail,
says Frank Muller-Karger, a biological oceanographer at the University of
South Florida in St Petersburg who has been comparing EMUs with weekly maps of
coastal changes made using satellite imagery. And to monitor change over
decades, the EMU team would need to recalculate its maps every five years or
more.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The EMU
developers say that future iterations of the system could tackle such issues.
For now, they are hoping to expand on the land and marine units by creating new
categories for coastal and freshwater ecosystems.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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