The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System: Building an MBON for the Florida Keys.

The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System Regional Association (GCOOS-RA) Data Portal was designed to aggregate regional data and to serve it to the public through standards-based services in useful and desirable forms. These standards are established and sanctioned for use by the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Program Office with inputs from experts on the Integrated Ocean Observation Committee and the RA informatics community. In 2012, with considerable input from staff from Ocean Biogeographical Information System USA (OBIS-USA), IOOS began to develop and adopt standards for serving biological datasets. GCOOS-RA applied these standards the following year and began serving fisheries independent data through an GCOOS ERDDAP server. In late 2014, GCOOS-RA partnered with the University of South Florida in a 5-year Marine Biodiversity Observing Network (MBON) Project sponsored by NOAA, NASA and BOEM. Work began in 2015. GCOOS’ primary role is to aggregate, organize and serve data that are useful to an MBON for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. GCOOS, in collaboration with Axiom Data Science, will produce a decision support system (DSS) for stakeholders such as NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries Program managers. The datasets to be managed include environmental observations from: field surveys, fixed platforms, and satellites; GIS layers of: bathymetry, shoreline, sanctuary boundaries, living marine resources and habitats; outputs from ocean circulation models and ecosystem models (e.g., Ecopath/Ecosim) and Environmental DNA. Additionally, the DSS may be called upon to perform analyses, compute indices of biodiversity and present results in tabular, graphic and fused forms in an interactive setting. This presentation will discuss our progress to date for this challenging work in data integration.