ANERIS: Marine Life Sensing Technologies for an Operational Marine Biology Network

The ongoing biodiversity crisis may result in much of the ocean's biodiversity being lost or deeply modified without even being known. Biological observations need to improve radically to serve our understanding of marine ecosystems and biodiversity under multiple climate and anthropogenic-related impacts. In the European ANERIS project (operAtional seNsing lifE technologies for maRIne ecosystemS), we address these observational challenges by developing the next generation technologies for sensing marine-life.

The project proposes the concept of Operational Marine Biology, understood (in analogy with the Operational Oceanography) as a systematic and long-term routine measurements of the ocean and coastal life, and their rapid interpretation and dissemination. ANERIS will improve and integrate different acquisition technologies based on genomics, imaging and participatory systems to cover the wide range of body sizes of the different organisms that lives in the ocean. The achievement of the Operational Marine Biology network is a key goal for the next decade and will enable a base line of biological information related to Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) and Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs). It will also deliver critical data for descriptors for Marine Policies, in particular the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD).

Overall, the project proposes to benefit all the actors involved in the quintuple helix framework of innovation, promoting innovation and knowledge sharing among them: (1) the academy with new life-sensing technologies to use in research; (2) the industry with new technologies and methods to exploit; (3) the governments, with improved observational systems and data products to be used in  environmental management directives; (4) the civil society, empowered through the proposed participative technologies and large collaborative networks and (5) the involved Marine Research Infrastructures in ANERIS, integrating new generation of sensing instruments and methods, and their staff being trained on those new technologies.

We acknowledge the whole ANERIS consortium for the various contributions to validate the concept of the Operational Marine Biology.