This Saturday June 21st, collect samples from bodies of water to catalog the ocean’s microbial biodiversity.
Want more marine-themed citizen science projects? We’ve got you covered!
This Saturday June 21st, citizen scientists will be able to take part in MyOSD (official site) the citizen science component to this year’s Ocean Sampling Day (OSD). The event is organized by Micro B3 (Microbial Biodiversity, Bioinformatics and Biotechnology) a European cross-disciplinary multi-institute collaborative aimed at developing large-scale research efforts to forward marine biodiversity research. On OSD, scientists around the world will collect water samples in an effort to catalog the ocean’s microbial biodiversity. On the same day, citizen scientists will gather environmental and contextual data. Organizers say that this ‘snap shot’ of the Earth’s waters might be the ‘biggest data set in marine research that has been taken on one single day.’[1]
Scientists are interested in marine microbes because of the role they played and continue to play in shaping our global environment. Microbes were critical to the evolution of life on the Earth. “Microbes were the first organisms evolving on Earth. When microbes developed the ability to photosynthesize, they began producing oxygen. This transformed the Earth’s early environment, making it hospitable to life,” explains Julia Schnetzer a graduate student at the Jacobs University and Max Planck Institute and the MyOSD coordinator.
“Today, marine microbes still produce more than fifty percent of the oxygen we need to breathe and consume fifty percent of the world’s carbon dioxide. In addition they are involved in key biological processes in the ocean system such as nitrogen fixation and the carbon pump.” Nitrogen fixation increases the availability of biologically accessible nitrogen by transforming atmospheric nitrogen into ammonium. The ocean’s carbon pump is a biological cycle which removes atmospheric carbon and sequesters it into organic materials deep inside the ocean. Several gigatons of atmospheric carbon are cycled into the oceans each year.[2] “Their participation in these processes make microbes critical in shaping the climate of the planet and thus are essential to the health of our environment.”
OSD will help scientists understand microbe biodiversity and how microbes affect the environment. On the 21st of June, teams of scientists will take water samples at various locations and identify microbial content via DNA sequencing. Marine microbes are particularly challenging to raise in culture, which has hindered their study in the laboratory. However advances in high through-put DNA sequencing technology have made it more practical and cost effective to study marine microbes directly from their natural habitat. In addition to analyzing microbe content, scientists will be taking environmental and contextual data such as water salinity, mineral content, air and water temperature.
“The results from OSD will produce two sets of data especially useful for marine scientists. The data about microbial biodiversity will help us understand which species are present and what they are doing. The environmental parameters will give us an idea on how the microbes influence their environment and how the environment influences them,” says Schnetzer. All the collected data will go into a publicly available open source repository. Researchers and citizens can visit the OSD map to see the locations and the genomic, environmental, and contextual data from the sampled sites. The website provides a helpful tutorial on farming the data.
More areas sampled mean better resolution of our ocean’s picture. OSD organizers need citizen scientists to help fill in the gaps. If you live near a body of water, you can help collect environmental information such as location, time, and temperature. Even if it is just a small nearby stream, OSD organizers still want your data. If you own water sampling devices, or are willing to build your own like a simple Secchi Disk, you will be able to provide additional useful information such as water pH or transparency. Download the free OSD app (Android and iPhone compatible) to make submitting your measurements easier. Don’t have a phone? Just save the data and submit it later online. Find out details about contributing to the project, data gathering instructions and analysis kits here.
Organizers hope that by engaging citizen scientists it will provide a better understanding of the value of our oceans and the need to protect them. “The more citizen scientists support there is for MyOSD the better the event will become and the more emphasis can be placed on the importance of education and outreach in marine science in future OSDs,” says Schnetzer.
So this Saturday, go out, get wet and get some data!
References:
[1] My OSD-OSD Citizen Science
[2] National Oceanography Centre – Biological Carbon Pump
Top Image: OSD-Micro B3
Bottom Image: megx
Dr. Carolyn Graybeal holds a PhD in neuroscience from Brown University. She is a former National Academies of Science Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellow during which time she worked with the Marian Koshland Science Museum. In addition the intricacies of the human brain, she is interested in the influence of education and mass media in society’s understanding of science.
