Citclops @ Ocean Sampling Day 2014
On June 21 2014 a worldwide sampling campaign of microbial life within marine surface water was successfully performed within the framework of Micro B3’s Ocean Sampling Day (OSD). It encompassed more than 180 marine research locations from Iceland to Antarctica and from Moorea (French Polynesia) via the Americas to South Africa including the German Wadden Sea.
The novel Ocean Sampling Day (OSD) concept was designed within the EU-funded project Micro B3 to facilitate a global, coordinated, standardised campaign in marine data collection. Until now the downstream analysis methods used in this field did not always enable easy interpretation and comparisons. OSD pilot sampling activities (four held to date) have shown that this new approach is generating an exciting set of new and fully standardized data from sampling to sequencing, analysis and annotation of gene functions.
In the months after the OSD DNA from the marine microbial communities thriving in the world’s oceans and populating our surface waters at the sampled sites will be sequenced. This will be done according to standard operating procedures for biodiversity bioinformatics, and also to find out about unknown functional genes. Environmental data, some of them captured with help from citizen scientists (www.My-OSD.org), will be integrated for these purposes through the Micro B3 Information System. All data, once validated and quality controlled, will become publicly available.
Citclops scientists from the ICBM contributed biodiversity samples from a field trip with the ICBM research vessel Otzum at the Citclops core area Wadden Sea, OSD site 148 (http://mb3is.megx.net/osd-registry/list). Together with students from the University Oldenburg, environmental data as retrieved by sensor systems onboard the research vessel Otzum were collected and uploaded via the My-OSD smart phone app.
In this year, also Citclops measurements were integrated at selected sites. Besides measurements of water colour with the Citclops App at OSD site OSD148, measurements were contributed from Ireland, Iceland (and the NL?).