This is a quick diary to draw your attention to another useful citizen science initiative I have been involved with recently. Indigo V Expeditions is a project headed up by Dr. Federico Lauro and Rachel Jensen with the goal of equipping blue water sailors with scientific equipment to make fundamentally important oceanographic observations in under-sampled areas of the world ocean. In 2013 I was part of a ~6500 nautical mile expedition from Cape Town, South Africa to Singapore. S/Y Indigo V is a beautiful, Nautor Swan 61 that the team sailed in 4 legs across the Indian Ocean as a proof of concept expedition to determine how recreational sailors could contribute valuable scientific information toward understanding the diversity and activity of micro-organisms that make up the base of the marine food web.
Blue Water Sailors as an Untapped Resource
Blue water cruisers move seasonally on established routes which take advantage of good weather windows, favorable winds and desirable ports of call. These routes are shown in the figure below.
Tracks of cruising yachts worldwide plotted by month. Density of yacht traffic is highest in red. Note the seasonality of transits: there exists high density traffic during the “Coconut Milk Run” in the Pacific beginning in April, eastward Atlantic ocean traffic during the boreal summer and then westward during the boreal winter, and passages to Alaska in the heart of the boreal summer.Given the number of transits through open, under-sampled areas of the world ocean, cruising yachts represent potential platforms from which useful oceanographic data might be collected. To equip these recreational vessels to collect such data the Indigo V team is devloping an automated sampling system called the Ocean Sailing Microbial Observatory (OSMO).
What measurements are made and how?
Citizen scientist cruisers install the OSMO, that is purpose built for water sample analysis, on their vessel. The device is capable of some autonomous sampling, is energy independent and is easily installed on the host vessel. One of the primary functions of the OSMO is to collect particles and micro-organisms from which genetic information and other molecular markers can be subsequently extracted and characterized in a laboratory onshore. In addition to these biological samples citizen scientists can measure basic physical parameters like water temperature and salinity, monitor surface winds and weather in open ocean locations that are poorly measured by remote sensing, and record types and amount of surface debris.
I sailed on the Maldives to Phuket Thailand leg of the expedition. One of the primary goals of that leg was to determine what impact the commercial shipping lanes might be having on surface ocean biological and chemical processes. We had some hair raising adventures (storms, a shark, and getting as close as we could to container and tanker ships to sample their wakes). If you are interested, you can listen to an interview I gave on Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald of CBC Radio here in Canada.
You can read more about the Indigo V Project in this PLOS Biology paper published in 2014 or by visiting the project website here.
The videos below chronicle the past Indian Ocean expedition and some of the volunteers who will be making measurements for the Indigo V project in the future. You can seem me sampling from the bow of the ship with a fiberglass poll and working in a plastic enclosure inside the boat to process samples without contaminating them.
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