 Hi everyone! Thanks for coming here. It's great to see everybody. I know a lot of you but not all of you and I'm happy to see you here and also really happy to be able to talk to my great crew here about the thriving ocean which you know I hope all of you were able to just hear Bob Ballard who is always a good time and you know he has I say I'd say in the past couple of years really as a lot of us have really started to think about like how is this going to work? How is the next five, ten, fifteen, fifty years actually going to work? And what is it that we need to know that we don't already understand and how are we going to act on that understanding? I mean one of the things that has always been a mantra especially when I was at National Geographic was you know there's never been a more important or urgent time for us to understand how does the world work and what is our place in it and I think that this is what this panel is a lot is like how do we make sure that the ocean thrives so that we can thrive and I think there's a real connectivity between you know there's just an essential connection between us and the ocean for air for food for anything for you know just the air we breathe just about everything that is important to us. So I want to quickly have my my my panelists introduce themselves with a couple of quick lines so that they can tell us what they're up to but and then we'll go to their presentations. That's good. I'm Jeffrey Marlow and I'm a postdoctoral scholar of geobiology at Harvard University. I am mostly studying microbial communities in the deep sea that consume methane and kind of thinking about what that means for the planet. I'm also a science journalist and I am the executive director of the Ad Astra Academy. We work with students around the world to be inspired through exploration to pursue knowledge. Okay so I'm Diva Amon and I am a deep sea biologist who hails from the Caribbean and I'm also a Marie Curie Skardowska Fellow at the Natural History Museum in London quite amountable and there my research focuses on trying to answer two questions what lives in our deep oceans and then how are we impacting it. I'm also the co-founder of a marine NGO nonprofit in the Caribbean called Species and we focus on marine education advocacy and research. Hi everyone I'm John Mandelman. I am the chief scientist and vice president of the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium. The Anderson Cabot Center represents all of our research and conservation work at the Aquarium. I've been at the Aquarium for almost 20 years. I started out in the days when I had time to be a scientist as a physiological ecologist doing mostly fisheries biology and fishery science to try to provide essential information to better manage and inform policy and regulatory decisions in our oceans and I'm really a fishy guy. I've started out studying sharks and fish and that's still sort of my bread and butter but now I'm in charge of a large center of around 40 people all trying to come up with creative solutions to the biggest oceans ocean problems. I don't think these are on. My name is Iana Elizabeth Johnson. I'm a marine biologist by training and I've spent the last decade working with Caribbean communities trying to solve this crazy puzzle of ocean conservation by integrating science and policy and communication and economics to figure out what the future could look like and I am founder and president of Ocean Collective which is a consulting firm for ocean conservation strategy that's grounded in social justice. Great all right I guess mine is the only I should have passed you all my one. So what we'll do is go through everyone's presentations but as you can tell it's really it's a it's it's a good bunch of people here so I think we have Jeff's cued. You guys can go ahead and play it. Microphone. All right so I'm a microbiologist and I'm mostly interested in thinking about how these microbial communities shape our planet. Microbes are everywhere. They're in any drop of seawater they're more than a million different organisms. New species are discovered every single day and they really form the foundation of what we might term a healthy and thriving ocean in this context. They transform different nutrients. They recycle different essential cofactors. They change the chemistry around them in a way that makes things habitable for the rest of us. They're really the foundation of any ecosystem and the ocean in particular and like the foundation of a building we need to understand exactly how they work how stable they are how they discuss and communicate amongst themselves in order to really be a sustainable thriving community. So to illustrate that point I'm going to ask you a question about these two pictures. Which one kind of evokes thoughts of biodiversity more? On the left we have a picture of the Amazon rainforest. There are probably several hundred species of plants we're seeing in this picture. It's kind of the epitome of a lush diverse ecosystem. On the right a hundred thousand times smaller in scale is a grain of sand from the North Sea and every single green dot you see is a different microbe. There are 8,000 different species on the single grain of sand. So what does this mean in terms of biodiversity and sort of maintaining a thriving ecosystem? Well like anything that is a fundamental trait of our world there are a lot of different definitions for biodiversity. The one I'm using here is from the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and they would use this definition that it's the variability among living organisms from all sources including among others terrestrial marine and other aquatic ecosystems ecological complexes of which they are apart. The operative word here to me is variability and the functional most fundamental unit of biological variability to me is a gene product gene variation. Genes that make proteins are the functional unit of biology. They're the things that allow us to transform sunlight into food or a toxic chemical into a harmless one. These are the units that change the world biochemically and are important in terms of biodiversity. So where is all of that biodiversity potentially coming from? Here are some estimates about the number of species and gene products that exist. So a recent study suggested there are a trillion different species of microbes and 85 million macroscopic organisms the plants and animals we see around us all the time. And while there are certainly more genes inside a macroscopic organism the sheer number of microbes means that about three orders of magnitude a thousand times more protein forming genes are found in the microbial world. Let's put that in context if this square here on the right is the kind of quantity of gene products from plants and animals this entire slide is what's coming out of the microbial world. And this is kind of where the deep ocean comes into play. Where are we going to find these new gene products and these crazy environmental systems that allow diversity to thrive? This is the Guimis basin in the Gulf of California. It's a heavily sedimented hydrothermal system and these interactions between different types of chemistry really allow for multiple energetic niches to form and these are the types of environments that allow a huge diversity of microbes to exist. Of those one trillion potential species we've characterized or at least seen genetic snippets of only 10 million so there are 99.999 percent of the microbial diversity still out there waiting to be discovered. And if we think about where to target that search I like to think of the earth as a battery and the deep ocean as a sort of discharging battery where these chemically reduced energy electron rich fluids from the interior of the earth are coming into contact with this sort of oxidized electron poor ocean. This is where energy is produced by chemistry rather than by light. These are chemo synthetic habitats and there are three broad flavors of these that exist. They're the hydrothermal vents that precipitate black minerals as they spew metals into the ocean. They're hydrocarbon seeps that's where I've done most of my work and this is where methane is fueling these symbiotic relationships of microbes that build carbonate rocks and then these lost city type alkaline hydrothermal vents which are getting a lot of attention as potential incubators for the origin of life. And those three types of chemo synthetic habitats you know there are hundreds probably thousands of those different vents and seeps and mixture of fluids around the world but in the deep sea we've only seen about 0.01 percent of the seafloor. So if that much amazing biological diversity that has changed our conception of what biology is capable of if we've only seen that in that tiny fraction it's amazing to me to think about what's in that 99.99 percent we haven't seen. So the question I'm kind of charging the audience with today is how to focus that search how do we go from this regional scale sense of an ocean maybe looking at bubble plumes zooming in to perhaps get a visual survey taking a chunk of sediment to look at the way that these minerals interact looking at microbes and minerals on a micro scale we're crossing 12 different orders of magnitude here so zooming in on this is hard and what kind of proxies of metabolic diversity can we look for at a larger scale to zoom in on what's really interesting. So to back up to me the big picture again is what is all of the unknown metabolic diversity in the microbial world what are they doing and how are they building this important foundation for the rest of the biosphere. On the most fundamental level what are the metabolic reactions we haven't even imagined yet that still exist and in a more applied sense how can we use some of these gene products perhaps for biotech purposes or for health purposes. So to me it's really the microbial world that is underlying a thriving ocean and I look forward to hearing other people's thoughts of how these can integrate to kind of preserve a a healthy healthy ocean. Thanks. Like I might have to ditch the notes. Okay so Jeff does deep sea stuff as do I. Jeff tends to look at the really really tiny things whereas I'm a couple order magnitudes bigger I do the megafauna which are the really charismatic animals that we can see in images and video. So I was saying my research tends to focus on two questions what lives in our deep oceans and how are we impacting it. And so we're here today to think about how our oceans exist and how we continue to keep them thriving. Okay am I not loud enough? Okay so hold on let's do a little shuffle room. Right so where we need to start is that most of our deep ocean most of our oceans are actually deeper than 200 meters that's all of the blue on this map. Over 60 percent of our planet's surface is deep sea and that's 98 percent of all habitable space on our planet that's the largest ecosystem by far. And with this large size comes great responsibility our deep sea provides us with ecosystem services that are essential to keeping our planet healthy and to keeping us alive. So its request is carbon it regulates climate and it cycles nutrients and now more than ever our deep sea is becoming a source of food oil and gas and many other key resources that we need to survive as stocks are dumbling in shallow waters and in on land sorry. So as I said oil and gas food well we can't see food in that picture but food and even genetic materials are currently being harvested from our deep seas with things like mining for minerals due to begin imminently and these are polymetallic nodules you can see here in this top image which contain a lot of metals. So in addition to this we've also got climate change and pervasive pollution as key impacts in our deep seas and these anthropogenic impacts are already impacting the communities and habitats and even the basic functioning of our deep sea and this is only going to become more exacerbated as time goes on and that would be fine if the story ended there but it doesn't unfortunately there are two further compounding issues firstly most of our deep sea as Jeff was saying is unexplored more than most of our deep sea floor has probably been mapped at a resolution of about five kilometers and that's not really a lot that means that whole mountains are missing from the story furthermore mapping is just sort of a peak of what actually exists down there and in order to be able to you know really understand we need to go down there we need to explore and by explore I mean visualize so 99 percent over 99 percent as Jeff said is unexplored has never been visualized and that's just an absolutely staggering figure that means that we can't even answer basic questions questions like what lives there much less questions about the ecology of many of the animals down there you know what do they eat how do they reproduce uh how do what is the what role do they play in this ecosystem and the second problem is that most of our deep seas are unregulated and that's because they fall into areas beyond national jurisdiction which is all of the blue on this map and that basically means international waters it means that our deep seas are sort of a you know this wild wild west essentially where protection and management and governance don't really exist and that means a lot of the biodiversity there is left really vulnerable so I said we already have you know fishing that has sort of rampage the high seas over the last century as well as many other impacts just increasing as time goes on one of the biggest looming impacts right now is deep sea mining and so these colorful blocks here that you can see are actually areas that have already been leased for exploration for deep sea mining to begin soon and that's done by the international seabed authority which is an intergovernmental organization responsible for all mineral related activities in areas beyond national jurisdiction and so in terms of the grand scale of things this may not seem that big when you think each of those 26 areas are tens of thousands of square kilometers and bigger than countries and that the potential resource is so much greater we have a ticking time bomb on our hands so and this is only one of the types of potential exploitation that can happen in the deep sea in the future but it's not all bad news you know the deep sea everywhere we've looked and the little that we've explored has continued to absolutely astound us we have made the most wondrous discoveries new species like the jelly and the carnivorous sponge we were just seeing to new habitats pillow lavas hydrothermal vents that are absolutely bursting with life and gushing black fluid underwater lakes coral beds who you name it and we found it the deep sea just continues to really push our boundaries to break down those paradigms of life and as I said just be generally pretty amazing but life in the deep sea is very difficult for a lot of the animals living down there they grow really slowly and reproduce even slower and so that means that they're incredibly vulnerable to change which is of course increasing things like this this basket star and the crinoid we're about to see there is so little that we know about them we know some tube worms can live for hundreds of years some corals for thousands but we have no idea for the majority of the biodiversity in the deep sea who knows what else is left out there to discover I mean I think there's probably quite a lot and what we can say for sure is that whatever we do find in the future will be equal measures of both really weird and really wonderful so how do we ensure that our oceans continue to thrive for generations to come of course it's not an easy question to answer but what we do know is that our deep seas need to play a really integral role and I think there are a couple approaches we can take to begin with so firstly we need to explore and collect baseline data we cannot protect what we do not know and we cannot manage what we do not understand next to be able to do that we need to innovate deep sea research and exploration is difficult costly and time consuming and given the amount of work we have to do we have to change that we also need to raise awareness and engage stakeholders the deep sea is currently out of sight out of mind and again that needs to change we need to increase our governance we need to make sure our high seas our international waters are governed in a way that is fair and equal and also in a way that ensures that the resources there will be sustained for generations to come and if we can't get all of that environmental data that we need to make really sound decisions about management before exploitation begins then we need to take the precautionary approach and so that means following this hierarchy here and it shows that avoiding and preventing impacts should be the first priority we need to know we need to make sure sorry that when we go into our deep oceans we go there to appreciate it rather than to plunder it because our oceans will not continue to thrive unless our deep oceans do thank you trust my mic all right thank you everybody and it's an honor and privilege to be here i definitely want to thank uh joey and alex as well as katie for putting this on and also my colleague jane wilson at the aquarium wherever she is um back there hi jane um for allowing the introduction or the involvement of the new england aquarium in this amazing event and um for my involvement so i thank you very much so the thriving ocean um i'm going to talk a little bit today about where i feel the social side comes in um there are a lot of amazing people some heroes of mine at this meeting today who are doing just amazing exploratory work and i think what diva said really resonates as far as we cannot protect what we don't understand i'm going to talk a little bit more about that but i think in terms of actually enacting change and driving solutions on the ocean we have to combine all the technological innovations and the amazing science that goes on and ensure it's maximally applied so as i mentioned during the introduction my role in leading the anderson cavitt center for ocean life we are we believe very strongly in using science to drive solutions transforming science into action we combine scientific solutions to different problems or scientific ideas with uh building extensive partnerships and collaborations and the convening power of the aquarium to drive change my background as a scientist and being a field biologist i believe very heavily that we cannot again to to talk to what diva said um i believe very strongly that we cannot protect what we don't understand so my entire career has been based on trying to identify the areas of of need um trying to figure out the or evaluate the data gaps and then going out there and trying to diagnose the problems fill those data gaps and come up with the solutions necessary but not stopping there ensuring that that science that information is transmitted to the end users that are going to put it to use what challenges us um as bob ballard said during during his keynote so eloquently we've got a lot of challenges out there and we haven't necessarily done a great job to this point climate change is obviously a major problem challenging our oceans right here in our backyard in the gulf of man the rates of thermal increase are astronomical relative almost as high as any other place on earth we're seeing major shifts and where our fish migrate where they live where animals occur we've got overfishing obviously as diva pointed to being a major problem we're seeing roughly 50 percent of all species out there have gone through some level of decline in population in the last 30 years we're seeing roughly 85 percent of species in the ocean that are exploited to one level or another and roughly 40 percent of the animals that are caught in global fisheries every year are incidental catch bycatch that has to them be discarded which is a huge waste as many of those animals die immediately or sometime after they've been thrown back and then finally we're seeing major industrialization of the oceans ocean shipping has increased or quadrupled over the last 20 years alone and the governance of our ocean is missing as diva pointed out less than five percent of the earth's oceans are protected and even where they are protected enforcement is very very thin so these are big challenges but that being said yes we are playing a game of catch up there is a changing environment out there and we have to keep up with it but there is hope and we have to base everything on solutions if it's all about doom and gloom and the perilous end to our our earth and the oceans as they stand we're not going to get very far we have to look at the victories and we have to look at the things that have worked the protection of habitats the protection of species the restoration of certain key species we've seen a lot of amazing things happen and we've seen the power of collaboration and innovation and it's all about working together not to sound cliche but it is absolutely vital as i'll get to the second that we work together to drive those solutions it is not as dire as many make it out to be and the sky is falling is something that gets people's attention but to drive solution requires building trust equity and collaboration and understanding that gains are possible so what are those solutions well first of all it's a marathon not a race i think sometimes we're so desperate to enact policy changes or try to drive very extensive reform that very often we lose sight of the fact that it's the long-term collaborative networks and the building of equity in the developing world and other areas around the world that's going to to drive change we need to empathize with others that are gaining from ecosystem services and understand that the livelihoods of them and their families the food they eat is based around the ocean we are all taking from the ocean we cannot undercut those communities and those people and those industries that rely on the ocean but at the same time we have to protect it so we have to work together to do that and collaboration is the absolute key to that as well as empowering people that are on the front lines people and coastal communities in the developing world and ensuring that everybody is involved and then everybody feels a stake and building the equity so that those countries those those populations those indigenous cultures and then everybody else around the world are understanding that we have to safeguard this for the long term and that's absolutely key so short term outcomes can sometimes win but in the long term it's building that collaboration and working together that's going to end up driving the biggest change so I would just challenge this panel and the entire conference today to think about some key questions what are the social innovations for environmental justice where can we ensure or what solutions can we drive to ensure that empathy collaboration and communication are integral to where we're going across the world as far as protecting the oceans and safeguarding the oceans resources how can we scale the solutions the amazing work that everybody here is doing everybody this meeting is doing how is ultimately going to ultimately going to make a bigger difference than just the individual footprint that you're working in and how can we drive these changes to tackle the biggest problems what are the social innovations how can we combine technology with social science socioeconomics bioeconomics to end up coming up with solutions we need to for the long term and I think that there's amazing work being done around the world harnessing that and working together is the key nobody's going to get it done in a vacuum so I'm excited to hear what people have to say and to learn more about from all of you about where we're going thank you this one work no try this hello all right is that a problem that I did a switcheroo okay they're on it hi everyone I have some pictures to show you so when I think of the future of ocean conservation and exploration I think of these four ideas ocean zoning coastal cities the need for triage and the importance of inclusion to give you a little context about where I'm coming from the work that I do now is as founder and president of the ocean collective which is a consulting company for ocean conservation strategies that are grounded in social justice and I've built an incredible team of 14 experts whose experience spans science and policy and political strategy and communications filmmaking event planning big wave surfing you name it and the idea is we can come together in these targeted teams to help create solutions for nonprofits and corporations and philanthropists who are trying to figure out how to improve ocean health and this importance of building these robust multidisciplinary teams was really solidified for me in my last position I was executive director of the weight institute and I was working in Barbuda an island in the Caribbean trying to help that community and government figure out what it would look like to create a truly comprehensive and science-based plan for long-term sustainable ocean use so in Barbuda this is what it looked like to do ocean zoning there were three major drafts of the map starting with this first one that the government put out there as a straw man which the fishermen hated the fishermen came up with this second draft which they thought was more reasonable the blue are no take marine reserves they added these anchoring and mooring zones in green and the by the final draft which incorporates feedback from the full breath of the stakeholders we had this detailed and very interesting zoning but what does it actually look like to do this work this took 18 months there were seven rounds of community consultations there were two additional rounds specifically with fishermen there were 22 meetings with the local government tons of coordination with the central government in Antigua but this is what the daily work looked like you'll notice Sha Selby in the center of that photo there this is um fishermen of a marine park ranger and immigration's officer um a technologist a GIS expert and me sitting around the table I we've interrupted a domino's game these folks wouldn't come to the community consultations and we really wanted to get their input and so for me when I think about the role of technology I think about it in this context how do we use technology to bridge the gap between people and their ideas and their communities and their cultures and solutions that will actually work in this context so on this little laptop we have satellite imagers that have been refined into habitat maps and we're able to give real time feedback into their different ideas of what zones could be put into place to tell them how that would affect um their fishing grounds and and what percentage of habitats would be protected by their proposals and this is what that final map to look like in more detail after 18 months so the blue areas are marine reserves that represents one third of their coastal waters out to uh three nautical miles from shore um within those protected areas one third of each habitat type is protected so seagrasses um reefs sandy bottoms and deep ocean the green is anchoring and mooring zones which are designated in sandy areas so as not to hurt bottom habitat and also designated primarily so they can limit where boats are anchoring and use that as a as an initial framework to collect fees from visiting vessels the pink is areas where no nets are allowed the fishermen thought it was really important to prevent the use of nets on reefs so this is no nets within 20 meters of the reefs and in other areas where there's high traffic you'll also note that the marine protected area on the southern end doesn't go all the way to shore and that's because there's a really important cultural use there people go camping there in the spring with their families around Easter time and they fish there to eat while they're camping and so creating a marine reserve that extended all the way to shore there would have had some really serious impacts on their tradition and then the last you'll notice is this shipping zone we don't want you know people swimming or fishing in in these high traffic areas so for this community of 1600 people on a small island this is what zoning they created all of these lines were drawn by the local people and we used technology um and a lot of sort of patient conversations to help facilitate that but obviously conservation efforts are not just important in remote tropical islands it's with you know eight billion people on the planet and soon the majority of us living on the coast and in cities it's really time to figure out urban ocean conservation so this is New York City I grew up in Brooklyn and I never thought of myself as living on the coast but New York has over 500 miles of coastline and so it's really important to me that when we think about exploration we're not just thinking about the deep sea but how can we use these ROVs and drop cams and all this other technology to help connect people who live in cities on the coast with their ocean which they are very disconnected with um so I've just recently moved back to New York and I'm very excited to to be thinking about ocean conservation in an urban context we have as the result of a really sort of long and arduous slog of regulations and improving policy we've seen that the waters of New York City are actually cleaner now than they've been in a hundred years we have whales coming back to New York Harbor we have seahorses living under piers in the Hudson River it actually works when you put in that effort to reduce pollution and establish protections so I'm really excited about this as one of the next waves of conservation however we've done a really good job of impacting um and destroying a lot of coastal ecosystems including the the oyster reefs and the marshes that protect us from things like hurricane sandy which is the moment when we realize that we are a coastal city and the blue economy of ports and shipping and fishing is worth over 350 billion dollars in the us alone and supports over three million jobs so it is important for a number of reasons to get this right whether we're caring about the economy or food security or coastal cultures so given the mess that we humans have gotten ourselves in I would actually posit that it's time to take a bit of a triage approach because we don't actually have enough money and time to save everything right now we need to think about a strategy for prioritizing our efforts so are there places that are not at immediate risk are there places desperately in need of immediate attention and are there things that are beyond help that would be a waste of our energy and um impede our ability to actually save a greater portion of other things this is a really hard discussion to have but it's one that I think we need to have if we're going to be successful and really maximize the the benefits of and successes of our efforts and I really don't think we're going to be successful unless we figure out diversity and inclusion this slide is blank because most of ocean conservation and exploration is very white this is a photograph taken earlier this month of the leaders of the international year of the reef which is aiming to protect and restore coral reefs around the world and this is a bunch of white people mostly men mostly middle aged or older and I honestly do not think that all of the solutions and ideas are present in this photo this says nothing to do with touchy feely views about diversity if we want to be successful we need to make sure that all the ideas and perspectives are at the table and you better believe it that the communities that live on the coast on coral reefs have been thinking about these solutions like their lives depend on it because their lives do indeed depend on it so when we think about the fact that the majority of course coral reefs are in uh in Asia in the Caribbean on the coast of Africa which are communities of color this is really atrocious so when I think about the future of ocean conservation and exploration I think it needs to look a lot more like this and so that's what gives me hope this idea that we can bring together diverse experts and everyone in this photo is an expert in a different way and have these conversations about how we can each leverage our expertise to come up with solutions that will enable us to continue to use the ocean to have it support our food security and economies and cultures but do all of this in a way that doesn't use it up so that's that's my vision thank you wow that was great so I'll start up with a few questions but you guys think of questions too and there is the super there is something fantastic when I when we have questions I will throw this to you which is a microphone so I'm really looking forward to that part but first I mean this is such a good set of problems because like I was saying I mean I'm thrilled to hear all you guys talking about all these different ways because it really is you know the the elephant in the room with all of how we're dealing with the ocean is still really people how are we going to make sure that people who are chucking stuff in the ocean all the time are going to see it and one of the things that I've always thought was difficult for people and the ocean is most of the time the water's in the way you can't actually see what's in there most of the time so I would just ask you guys what is it that in each of your different practices because they're all sort of different but they're the same what would you have people see and I think of that as like a storytelling but visualizing is so much how humans perceive things what would you have people see that they can't see that you have seen or that you want to see even if you've never seen it and could clear all the water out of the way for just a second to see it and understand something big about the ocean I think the like the same issue that is the problem the fact that there's water in the way and we can't see things makes it mysterious and exciting and that sort of quest to you know look beyond the next hill is inherent in that idea of looking you know just beyond the headlights of an ROV so I think that sort of sense of mystery and excitement is something I would try to share the other thing that I've always struggled with is the kind of intellectual emotional disconnect of microbes like they are not charismatic but they really matter so how do we image them or portray them or share that how amazing they are you know intellectually with a broader audience and don't have an answer to that but anthropomorphizing them or maybe um yeah they could be animalized more true yes yeah so that's right yeah so growing up in the Caribbean one of I spent a lot of time on on the ocean and just the exact question you asked what could we see I remember being out at sea and wishing that I had some kind of device that would show me what was down there from the day you could just have on the boat you know and just be like oh there's a squid down there oh there's some dolphins lingering over there I mean that's me as a kid but I think that with the deep ocean it's especially difficult I mean at least in coral reefs and shallow areas you can get yourself there and get into that in those environments but with the deep sea that's pretty much impossible but there are a lot of really great programs that are working to you know do away with that you know things like the ocean exploration trust and Noah's office for ocean exploration are really bringing the deep sea to the masses and the deep sea as as both Jeff and I have spoken about is just full of such amazing things things that people just can't even believe are real and I think that just by increasing that awareness in the population will probably go a very very long way to helping to sustain it so I would actually flip that question a little bit and say that we should be seeing more what others see so instead of us trying to show everybody else the ocean I tend to think that the stakeholders that have the biggest impact on the ocean have their own vision and view of the of the ocean and then we need to take their perspective into account more great examples the cooperative work we do with fisheries here in New England we work with a lot of commercial fishermen and the industry that we've seen they have their own perspectives that does that mean that they're always right not necessarily but their combined input and stake in the work has actually strengthened immeasurably a lot of the projects that we've done and that's their own way of looking at the ocean and their own and their own perspective so I think that we need to open our eyes and not get out of our own way once in a while in terms of what we're seeing and think about what others see and let that combined viewpoint drive change is this work this is a bummer okay what if I want to interject I think we need more glass bottom boats when I was five I went on a family vacation to Key West and I rode on a glass bottom boat and I saw a quarry for the first time and it blew my mind and that was the moment when I was like what is it called when it's your job to look through this glass and I was like I'm clearly going to become a marine biologist and so I think not everyone needs to become a marine biologist but that's that moment of experience and on whether it's you know not in clear tropical waters but you know in New York City and if you shine a light and things come and you could do it at night and see different things I think something that simple could have a really big impact we can't all go to the deep sea but again you know there's been lots of work around the communications efforts of live feeds of expeditions and all that kind of stuff is great too but I would honestly love to see more glass bottom boats there's so few of them in the world okay keep that for a second and I'm just gonna yell so so one of the things you mentioned too is that idea of that technology has this great way of building bridges or you know just bridging gaps between people and and making that connection so what technologies to have you guys think about this are you know have you seen do that because you know we've got you know when you know Bob has his great telepresence which is actually like you know you can you know if you guys haven't looked on the Nautilus online just check it out because you can see real time you can ask questions of somebody who's scooting around out in the Pacific or whatever and that's fantastic also maps of being able to you know if you were saying is in real time to get fishermen who might completely live there and see it all the time but just to see a different view of how this looks and make those great decisions so I mean what what technologies here we are at you know at Katie's super party and talking about the tech but what is the what are the technological things that you see connecting again connecting people to their ocean that are interesting our boats technology I could I use my same answer um so I actually um as a consultant one of my clients in the last year has been XPRIZE and I helped them design a um a competition to develop apps using existing ocean data sets so we have tons of data about the ocean lots of it is from NOAA lots from other you know research institutions and a lot of it is actually already public and yet that data isn't accessible or visualizable to the public and so I designed this competition for them that enabled the idea was to sort of unlock all the data we already have obviously a new exploration is still fascinating and wonderful but we already know so much that's not being conveyed and so um I would encourage you all to check out the winners of this big ocean button challenge um there are seven winners and one of them actually is an app that you can hold up when you're on the shoreline and see the bottom topography at least of the ocean you can't see what's swimming there right at that moment but you can kind of start to get a glimpse into um into the pathometry and and start to visualize that there actually is uh some you know some complexity beneath the surface and so those kinds of things like how can we use the fact that we carry around tiny computers in our pockets to help um see and explain those kinds of things um one example um that I've seen work well I think that appreciation really requires being immersed to the best possible degree and obviously with technology these days people can do that from their computers or their smartphones their iPads um but I think the whole advent of of VR virtual reality at a at a low price and accessibility through Google and other networks the technology is amazing and you really can feel like you're there and I think that's the closest thing that we can get to bringing everybody out there and immersing them obviously in-person um saturation so to speak in the environment is by far the most impactful way to actually be out there and see it with your with your own eyes but thanks to technology there's a lot of new ways to get people out there if that's what you're trying that's about you're trying to push and get people exposed so I those were both my answers by the way thanks but um no I do think there is immersing people in the environment is the main way to do that everyone is visual and being able to actually see you know an entire world that you can't really visualize normally has huge steps towards getting people to want to conserve it and so for instance in deep sea science you know things like VR technology are sort of the future it you know telepresence takes us down there but then actually being able to feel like you're down there is just one further step which is absolutely fantastic and we're just on the cusp of of getting that you know into people's homes and mainstreaming yeah so I would absolutely agree with all of that but it might also push back and make a case for the the tangible a little bit more when we um you know work with kids who maybe never been to the ocean before realized that there are other planets or something like that as part of our education program we have an opportunity for them to take pictures of mars and work with nasa to actually get new images from a different planet which is sounds so cool another part of the curriculum is that we go to the coast and look at water under a microscope and for probably more than half the students that's actually more impactful it's just like seeing a new world and something that is seems so quotidian and realizing that there is a whole thing beyond what you actually see but making it you know connecting the dots and it's not just something on a screen still regardless of how far away it is but it's it's right there but that's that's the thing I mean I think I can talk but that's the thing is we're talking about connecting the dots for again for humans because they are the ones that have to take care of it but again this idea of connecting people also to how they what is their place in all of this too not just to look at it like oh blue planet I watched on tv it was great but it's not necessarily relevant you know I think that the idea of you know making again whether it's coastal communities whether it's people who are you know buying fish or something you know that idea of making people also feel that they're empowered you know at the very closest level but then at the bigger level you know at a every day level even if you do live in Wichita you know home of all the marine biologists but how can we how what is if you if you guys could sort of wave a magic wand there are a huge bunch of challenges facing us but what would be a way to make sure that you know have a solution that we could scale up I mean this is kind of there's I'm staggered by the by the enormity of the problem in a certain way and I'm sure you guys often are too but the idea of just trying to figure out what would be the technological solutions or policy solutions some of these things are absolutely policy whether or not we actually can protect the high seas is totally a policy thing whether or not I mean I think that your solutions on you know coming up with speaking to each individual community and coming up with solutions is certainly the best one to start with this you know ground up but if you could empower those people with technological solutions what else would it be that would connect you know would create these big solutions that could it would you know aquaculture is it aquaculture that will actually connect us and save us or is it understanding the problem you're trying to solve yes all of these things are very different that you're describing so aquaculture we really need to figure out because we can't feed eight billion people on wild seafood the ocean just can't keep up with how fast we can eat fish so the technology that's needed there is super important for food security whereas the technology that's needed to support you know zoning and policymaking is quite different than the technology needed to monitor fishing and there's some really great innovations there with lower cost vms and and satellite tracking and all of that kind of stuff so I think I mean I think we need to be careful not to think of technology as the solution but to be more targeted like what is the specific problem we're needing to solve and is technology needed to solve that problem and if so like what specific technologies because I I worry about the mindset that like we can innovate our way out of problems where a lot of problems really just we need to agree with each other and the technology is a tool so I would echo what John said earlier which is we need to be talking about what's working and replicating and scaling success stories I think that that is a missing link and to the extent that technology can help spread the word about these stories of ocean optimism check out that hashtag online you'll find lots of what's working I think that that would be really valuable yeah I agree and I just to add to that I think mobilizing the public and creating awareness in the public is not always the right right solution it's not always going to pull the lever that you need to it's not the end all be all answer to problems sometimes problems are very individualistic around different a few different stakeholder groups that need to work together to drive change so I'm not opposed to awareness of the oceans and promoting that awareness but when it's pragmatic and when it's done in a way that's actually going to create the empowerment that we were just talking about and ensure that people's behaviors are changed but that's not always the right solution it's really case dependent depends on the question absolutely yeah but I love to cite the example of what's happened with shark fins over in in Asia recently in recent years there's been major initiatives to try to address what is driving the fin trade globally it's not trying to cut off the supply but actually working sensitively with the indigenous populations there to understand the depth of the problem it's caused by this particular demand and I think once that awareness has spread and at the demand side sensitively working together you're starting to see a reduction in the value of those fins yeah and that trend still has a lot of there's a lot of work that needs to be done but that's an incredible way of sensitive communication that isn't saying what you're doing is bad but here's what the effects of what you're doing and it's incredible what kind of a change that can draw when you bring in the people and involve them yeah so we only have a few more I mean go ahead quickly and then we'll have a few we have one more minute for questions oh one does anybody have a question a burning question that they have one burning question you guys have that you would like an answer to um I want to know how we can better incorporate art into these solutions because I think if we're going to have the cultural shift on a massive scale that we need it has to be appealing and attractive and sexy and beautiful and so that's what we need to figure out how where are you know what's the next generation of movies and art and sculpture and design that's going to inspire everybody to commit to this really hard and complicated work for the long term sorry I just have to talk into this for one second so I think to find the subsidies to help offset the cost of changing strategies for people that are very accustomed to doing things a certain way but new technologies are coming in that might allow them to keep doing that and then sit at the same time not have the impact on the ocean that's often very very costly and I think finding a way to get that money sounds uh it sounds really cheesy but there needs to be more funding that is um directed towards pushing these changes once they're engineered I just want to find out what lives in our oceans god damn it um no it's it's I I think that's one of the biggest questions is again you need to find out what's there before you can understand how to manage it and I think increases in technology and working with technologists and to actually be able to answer that question is sort of that burning issue yes I would certainly echo that and also I mean we were talking last night that there was a study last year where they found these these copepods in the mariana trench like the deepest most unexplored part of the ocean and they had PCBs they're full of PCBs so the fact that our tendrils of contamination are outpacing our initial characterization of places is a problem on the social side I think you know how we have the ideas of wilderness and urban life coexist is really interesting and your presentation made me wonder about that to me it's you know escaping civilization to go to the wild but because we live with an in nature we need to think more about that that sounds great oyster watching all right great this is so good you guys I mean seek these people out and ask them more questions later but we are good but thank you everybody anyone wants to ask questions on twitter I'm volunteering myself and Diva I have to answer your questions that people are watching online and we're using hashtag open ocean good hashtag open ocean great thank you everyone thank you um it's a very exciting time for sensors and the environment in general especially oceans right as is bob said in that great keynote there's so much that we haven't seen uh and it may not be human eyes that directly see all of it it's great to be because we can we can scale in other ways through electronics and networks and things like that so uh this is a great time to think about new kinds of sensors for the ocean at this point we're deploying internet of things scale sensors across the the planet in our habitat environments we're going to see that happen in natural environments and indeed we'll see it happen in the oceans and new technologies are really revolutionizing how we're able to sense things what we're able to sense and how we connect it to people so it's it's a great time I run the responsive environments group here at the the media lab so I've been doing sensing most of my life I even spent four or five years at draper lab doing underwater sensing too so I guess I have a slight privilege to be here with these honest honored guests but you know I've done a little bit of it and I think it's again a very exciting time going forward when all this comes together so we got a great panel to discuss this we're going to open up with statements from the panelists they'll give a short talk and then we'll have q and a from the audience and among ourselves so we're going to begin with Alan Leonardo from NOAA and then Anna Michelle from Woods Hole and finally Brennan Phillips from URI URI so maybe you guys can introduce yourselves and then we can start sure thanks Alan Leonardo I'm the director of NOAA's office of ocean exploration and research and also a member of the science advisory board for the ocean mapping XPRIZE I'm Anna Michelle I'm associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and I'm proud MIT alum so I'm happy to be back on campus and I'm Brennan Phillips I'm an assistant professor in ocean engineering at the University of Rhode Island okay great so maybe we can start with your your talks we'll begin with Alan sure great let me get out of the way a little bit let me say one thing to get us going I was a little bit surprised and maybe this is a good thing that when I looked at the agenda I am the only speaker here from the federal government so I I'm proud to say that I'm I'm here from the government and we need each other's help I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview about what our office does so we can talk about some get to the sensors and systems part of the conversation I believe strongly that the best part of any of these things is dialogue so I'll try to get this through this pretty quickly we'll start with the the obligatory statement about who we are we we are a pretty unique federal entity we are the only office within the within the entire federal government that focuses solely on exploring the ocean we are not a big entity by any stretch of the means but we have great partnerships that we work with along the way to try to stretch our boundaries of what we do and the reason why we focus on exploring the ocean quite frankly is because all of humanity requires us to the keys to the to the world and the solutions of the world really rest in the ocean we've we've heard this morning already some conversation about the many problems that the oceans face but we also have heard little snippets about the solutions that the ocean provides to all of humanity their primary protein source for the world there are next generation novel therapeutics if you're looking for drug discovery this is the place to go and of course we all love to live and play near the ocean as well so our purpose is exploration and we believe firmly that exploration leads to discovery that discovery then leads to follow on research that research leads to understanding that ocean environment and ideally our understanding of that in for ocean environment leads to fundamental wise use of that space we fulfill our purpose in a number of ways we have multi-year partnerships we have major campaigns that you undertake we'll talk about in a little bit we partner with entities such as the ocean exploration trust you've already heard from Bob Ballard this morning we use things like something called the National Oceanographic Partnership Program which allows for public private partnerships within the ocean space and of course we focus heavily on data sharing outreach and education as well our primary asset that we can use for exploring the ocean is a vessel called the Noah ship oceanic explorer it's dedicated it is the only US federal vessel that's dedicated to the mission of exploring the ocean there's some details here about any number of the assets there on that the one that most people are most familiar with are is the asset here's the ship itself is the asset on the back deck that you'll see in another picture this remotely operated vehicle it's a two-bodied system much like the ocean exploration trust vessel which will show up in a moment as well to give you a sense of the magnitude of what we've been doing this is the last three years of our work the office has been in existence since 2001 we've had a vessel since 2008 and over the last three years we've spent exploring the pacific communities and for the first time going to every managed place that Noah has responsibility for if it's a protected area a monument or a sanctuary for the first time we've gone to these places looked at the deep ocean environments and tried to give Noah a sense of our management responsibilities after all you cannot manage what you do not know and so we've gone here for the first time along the way we've also partnered with folks from the Cook Islands getting them to see their deep ocean environment for the first time ever nobody had ever done any work there before so we've been doing work with the Cook Islands and others as well you can look at some of the statistics here I won't bore you with them but we mapped a lot of the seafloor we had a lot of ROV operations and samples collected and things that nature and of course we had a lot of views we had 8.4 million live views on youtube one of our key things that we do just like the ocean expression trust is we broadcast what we do live to the public and we interact with scientists who may be on shore and we interact with communities of students and just interested people while we do our work moving forward over the next few years 2018 to 2020 this is a kind of a sneak peek of what we're looking at these slides are all going to be made available to you so if you want to dig in a little bit you want to reach out you want to participate let us know but we've moved back east of the canal and we're going to be focusing in the Gulf Mexico the Caribbean and the Atlantic through at least 2020 perhaps a little bit longer we've got a lot of activities already teed up some in partnership with other government agencies some in partnership with the academic community and some in partnership with folks like the Navy and it would not be fair of me to talk about our exploration capabilities without pointing out one of the other major assets that we support we of course don't operate the ocean exploration test the vessel Nautilus but we do support it we I'm proud to say are the primary benefactor currently of that vessels operations maybe it'll stay that way but Bob's very entrepreneurial as everybody knows and see he's always gaining additional resources to do the kind of work that they do as well this is the Nautilus plans for this this coming year so tune in there's going to be a lot of great discoveries some of this is follow on to the work that we've done some of this is some continuing stuff particularly along the Cascadia margin where there's some really extremely exciting vent communities so tune in there's always good discoveries gone on and as Bob likes to point out 24 by seven operations and lots of interactions with the public in the education community so it's not sufficient though to just go out there and collect this data and then kind of put it to give it to some scientists and put it on the shelf our goal is from ship to repository 90 to 120 days for all of the data that we collect and it becomes publicly available anybody who wants to use it can the bath the data is generally speaking within 60 days the biological samples go to the Smithsonian some of them are in the Bishop Museum for the communities in the Pacific and right now we've been sending some sub samples to the ocean genome legacy center as well to try to increase the ocean genome all of that data is publicly available all of those samples are publicly available anybody in the science community who wants to use them can and then we also focus heavily on public engagement we've got a strong web presence of course we tell it we telecast live what we do but we also have a teacher educational professional development program where we like the Nautilus folks develop lesson plans we get the teacher community together we teach them how to best use those lesson plans and then they use them in the middle school in the high school setting because after all the key is the key to the future of the ocean problems and the ocean solutions of tomorrow are the middle schoolers and the high schoolers of today so I'll leave it at that and we'll hand it over to the to the next speakers in the way but I look forward to the Q&A and and talking about how we can augment what we're doing with these existing platforms that I showed and some of the things that might be coming online in the coming years thank you so I'm Anna Michelle and I'm a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic institution and we're going to turn now to a little bit deeper into the sensing side so my lab works on developing new sensors for for making chemical measurements in the ocean so I'm going to show you some of the technology we've been developing and then I'm going to end with some of the big problems we have and this is where I really hope we can have some conversation later on how do we get new technologies into the ocean because some of our platforms are some of our instruments are still very big and so how do we move from these giant instruments to these small cheap sensors I know Alan has and I've had many conversations about this so I do a lot of gas sensing in my lab and I'm sure all of you have heard about how carbon dioxide so this is the blue line has gone up over time and so people want to make measurements of carbon dioxide there's another gas that's equally important um perhaps even more important that you've probably heard about methane so this is time versus concentration and so this is methane going up over time so methane's gone up and why do we care about it well there's a big influence on climate so these two gases are really important in the ocean and so we want to be able to measure them in lots of different environments but one of the problems is they're often from these diffuse sources so how do we actually make measurements in these different environments of these gases and also if they're in the gas form the ocean is liquid how do we actually make measurements of them and where do we want to make measurements of them so we look at the ocean as a whole there's lots of environments where these gases are really important and so if we step through some of these environments where we want to put these sensors out up in the Arctic there's areas of coastal areas also these lakes and coastal areas where there's a lot of methane coming up we want to be able to make measurements there Alan just mentioned the Cascadia margin there's a lot of methane bubbles that come up those areas where we want to be able to put instruments out to make those kind of measurements in coastal areas like estuaries there's a lot of methane that comes out there so how do we measure make measurements in those environments at seeps these cold seeps in the deep ocean hydrothermal events have a lot of these different gases so how do we make measurements there bubbles that come out either they could be carbon dioxide bubbles or they could be methane like in Cascadia margin and there's also these methane hydrates in the deep ocean so how do we actually get instruments that we can take out and make measurements in these environments instead of actually collecting a sample and bringing them back on the ship and then bringing them back to our lab and maybe six months later we have a measurement we want to make measurements at these sources so my lab works on this technique called laser absorption spectroscopy i'm going to simplify this but basically we have a laser and we have a detector the laser puts out light and we collect that light what we do is we pick the laser light to be at a certain wavelength and it's the same wavelength of whatever we want to measure absorbs light so as that light goes through our sample we see a decrease in the amount of light and then we can determine what's actually in our sample so we can do this for a bunch of different gases this is a picture here of the different wavelengths and different gases so methane is this red gas over here so the stronger these lines are the more light we can actually absorb in that region so what you can notice here there's a lot of different gases are important in the ocean that have this infrared signature so methane carbon dioxide nitrous oxide lots of different gases that we can use these techniques for so it's a really good technique to use for atmospheric sensing but also for ocean sensing one of the problems is though these lasers won't go through water so what we actually have to do is extract our gases so we have to build systems actually get the gas out of our seawater and then we can measure that gas so that brings in a new challenge to be able to bring these technologies to ocean environments so what have we done we built these systems to be able to make measurements coming out of surface water so out of things like lakes and coastal regions what we can do is we can launch this laser a really long distance over the water and any gas that's coming out of the water we can measure what we do is we use these really cool lasers these quantum cascade lasers each one of these stripes is actually a laser so they're really small so the idea of using these small lasers is we can make these small sensors but there's a lot of electronics involved so our sensors end up being really big for other reasons so even though our lasers have become really small our detectors have become really small there's a lot of other challenges that we need to address like how do you make the electronics themselves smaller how do you make the power packs smaller for example the batteries so another thing we do is we try to make measurements in these coastal regions and so what we do we can use the same kind of technology and we can buy these commercially packaged to take out in the field and we can put them into an autonomous kayak so this is a kayak that we can put all these different instruments on and drive around so here's the kayak driving around this is actually about an hour away from here what we can do is kind of like a remote control car we can drive it along as it drives along it can continuously make measurements of the chemistry in the surface waters so as you can imagine there's a lot of applications for this both in the coastal and we're going to take this out actually to Cascadia margin this fall to make measurements of methane coming up on the surface waters so what does it give us this is actually a map so this is a river here this is the longitude and latitude and what it can do is as we drive the jet yak up and down it can continuously make these measurements and so we can get start getting these large spatial scale measurements that can tell us what's happening in the water this is actually methane here and when you see it turn red this is actually a plume of methane that's being emitted here there's actually a wastewater treatment plant here so it's putting out a plume right here and so over time we can start to track it so as you can imagine there's a lot of different applications where we could have these autonomous vehicles that we could drive around and start making better spatial scale measurements third this is a project with pete gurgus who some of you saw this morning this is develop systems where we can do these kind of measurements in the deep ocean so this is the first generation system here that we can put out in the deep ocean we can put it on a vehicle like hercules and we can make measurements of carbon dioxide and methane in the deep ocean we've been developing a new system this is our new system here which is a lot smaller but it's still very complicated so you can see the system here is packaged into a pressure housing being put in hercules and you can immediately see what one of the problems is it takes two people to just lift that instrument i can't even lift it myself because the pressure housings are so big because the instruments are big so where are we with chemical sensing and where do we want to go well we're limited right now because the instruments are large they're heavy a lot of them require a lot of power so they're platform limited we can't put these instruments on a uvs right now we have to be on a vehicle like hercules they're also one of a kind there's one of each of these different instruments they're also highly technical so we need somebody to specialize in the instrument to be able to deploy it also funding is a problem it's it's not easy but what you can get funding to develop a first generation system but how do you get money to take that system into many different generations how do you push that instrument further so what do we want we want small easy use sensors that we can put on lots of different platforms we also want to look at new technologies there's a lot of labs that are developing technologies for other applications such as biomedical applications that we could really transition to ocean applications so what new technologies are available that we could look for i'm also personally really interested in doing plume hunting and tracking so when we put a uvs down for example can we put an instrument on it that can find these different plumes can they find vent fields can they find the bubbles for example so how do we move from having an instrument that we know is going to a targeted site to actually using instruments to find these sites thanks okay next we have Brennan there we go great thanks okay so my name is Brennan Phillips as i said i'm an ocean engineer at the University of Rhode Island but my other alter ego is a deep sea biologist so today i'll give me talking a lot about deep sea biology how it relates to technology and sort of the take-home theme it's pretty obvious you know you can't explore the deep ocean without knowing your tech so there are a couple disciplines they have to work together and with that there's some interesting themes to explore off of that but the topic of this whole workshop is these be here be here be dragons and so these are my dragons when i thought about it i was like well you know we're what our dragons actually look like underwater and so one of the projects that work on is in the western pacific on a submarine volcano that's really shallow a couple years ago we were exploring around this area and this is when it's erupting most of the time and we actually got inside the crater using a very piece of low of lightweight technology from national geographic and when it's not erupting it's full of sharks so just as an example this is out there but you can't take a big ship and set it out over there you have to just throw something over the side and see that right nearby there we found this deep sea shark at about 1800 meters again using that lightweight piece of technology but another theme i work on a lot with is hydrothermal vents which are also underwater volcanoes and on the nautilus in the Hercules ROV a couple years ago at the Galapagos we just were able to publish these findings we found a whole bunch of skate eggs embryos that are evidence that these deep sea skates are actually using these vents to incubate themselves and increase their or decrease the time it takes them to gestate another topic i work on is bioluminescence and using low light cameras so this is a school of flashlight fish out in the Solomon Islands in the western pacific this doesn't do it justice but to give you some representation of what this school looks like it's like an order of magnitude more it's like it's swarming around you we're able to film that and also using that same type of capability we're able to film bioluminescence in really high resolution and recently playing around with a color camera that same worm you just saw we can show that it emits a blue bioluminescence and it actually sheds it so we thought the animal was glowing but it's actually shedding it which is kind of cool another recent trip i was on this is in one hour of diving we found evidence of a bioluminescence sponge you google scholar that you won't find it and a bioluminescent black coral again you google that and you won't find anything i can't publish that that's you know it's a we have to actually collect these things but just flying around the dark you find some cool stuff if you just do that so changing the way we approach it and lastly a couple examples this is a trip just a few months ago on nautilus approaching animals with just some dim lights and so this is a jellyfish the size of a trash can called deep staria enigmatic and it's totally chilling and doing its thing we actually caught it capturing something and closing up and then we can get up really close and kind of do some interesting lighting on it sort of like you know interior lighting to show these canals that are beautiful and then the last example we found this vampire squid which was just hanging out and it was unaffected by us we're using a light to illuminate this that's less bright than your cell phone light and we're getting these color images of it so the animal isn't nearly as disturbed from that so again my point is that the technology that we use is key to seeing the ocean through different lens and so another take on that besides the low light imaging and all that sort of thing i just want to point out this robotic arm right here that's reaching out i'll talk about this in a second this arm is a very heavy duty arm it's about the size of me and the vehicle that takes to run it is about the size of a jeep so it's a really big heavy duty stuff a lot of gear we're bringing down just to collect if you're a biologist like me it's a lot of hardware to carry around just to do one particular thing so another project i work on are these squishy fingers which use low pressure seawater just background seared to collect animals very delicately and we've actually developed a whole arm i can't show you that to you today but we have a whole squishy arm that runs on two orders of magnitude less power than that big heavy duty arm that goes with it and so the entire platform itself becomes reduced by it and then when we dive down back to the low light camera stuff which is this here sitting on the front porch of herk we have the lights on guns of blazing but it's really interesting to just turn them down and look at it from a different perspective to go with it now i those are good ideas but i have a little bit of evidence to back that up that we're really missing a lot of things that are in the deep ocean because we're scaring them away so last take is if you're this deep sea shrimp right here and this giant 5 000 pound vehicle comes at you with stadium lighting on you're going to act a little bit differently you're going to run and then you reach out and try to grab it you know that's your that's your perspective from one of these vehicles and one thing i couldn't show because it's awful to your ears but these vehicles create a tremendous amount of noise as well in order to run those big manipulator arms and those thrusters they're running a hydraulic power pack and it's horrendous to hear the amount of noise that they create so this is my one slide of data so speaking of open data from from the NOAA office of exploration and research thank you very much these are some dives they did i think in 2016 in the western pacific in this etch a sketch line you see in the middle here this is a dive profile of their deep rov's they work together so there's two of them the red line is the seafloor you got depth here and what we're looking at is acoustic backscatter collected from the vessel at the same time the stuff in blue is stuff it's fish it's jellyfish it's shrimp that are in the midwater on this particular dive they were trying to explore the midwater and put them in the camera so the vehicles go down deep and all the scatterers go up then they say oh wait they're up here we're going to fly up and they all go down and then they recover the vehicles and they go back to doing what they were doing in the first place so just not seeing that at all and again this is what all these big exploration vehicles look like they look like her they look like deep discover these wonderful pieces of technology and i'm i used to be an rov pilot and i i love these things but then i started looking at it from the biological standpoint and i said maybe we should redesign these things a little bit so my last slide it looks like proposal land because that's where i'm at right now um actually on the left oh sorry excuse me on the left i've invested a lot of money with my new position to buy a winch which is like the most boring thing i could do with my money but it's a cool winch it's a small winch and it will provide access and allow me to bring out other people's platforms including my own so something on the right i'm proposing something i call the simple platform a battery powered platform with low light cameras and dim lights and that same technology that showed you those backscatters let's put that right down there and see if we can turn up the volume in terms of lights in terms of noise and see what these effects are and try to parse that out or since this is a workshop if other people have other ideas on ways that they would like to explore more elegantly i'll put it that way underwater come see me because i got the winch so i just need something to put on to it um to go with that uh yeah with that thank you a lot of motivation so uh now we can get into some discussion uh i'll start off with a couple questions then we'll just uh range free with the the crowd um of course sensing is is being revolutionized in many ways you know we're opening up all kinds of different things we can sense now with new technology one of which is in situ dna sequencing because you can get an important sequencer now for about five thousand dollars uh they're going to get much cheaper you know so you'll be able to plug it into your cell phone of course you have to prepare samples that may be where the the difficulty is but you know this could be intriguing to get real time instead of waiting months as you mentioned to get the data back have it sequenced in a lab someone and so forth just have data the stuff continually processed uh do you guys see this as being a potential future is is it is it a relevant thing for you you get some idea of the biology just from dna that's around in the water i can't tackle it i just know that there's a whole project out of vimbari that that did this i think pete worked on this this is one of your one of your things i forget the acronym thank you but it is possible but it was it was pretty big and i think it's just i'm on the same vein as as anna was saying there's sort of a lot of money out there to sort of put a first idea but in terms of making this a bit more robust and smaller i think that's where the hope is so i mean now you can get them about the size of your hand of course you have to work at pressure which is another another factor and again prepare this sample that's new to me that's really cool intriguing future yeah if i might tag on to that the the esp or the environmental sample processor developed by umbari was originally something about the size of a of a very large garbage can they then made it down to about the size of a of a coffee can with the goal of putting it on a uvs uh it was actually tested in the great lakes last year to detect a horrible algal bloom uh so very successfully but i what we're really seeing on the tech space in this arena is within the next 10 years probably flow through sampling capability um so you could you can envision a world in which you had a terrain following uh a uv so an autonomous underwater vehicle not an rov that's piloted by somebody with say stereo cameras uh other environmental sensors and flow through uh dna sequencing and all of a sudden you have the potential of being able to characterize not just what exists in that habitat but the environmental conditions that it exists in and not just those things that you can see that are existing in that habitats but all of the dna that might be present in that water stream in any given time i i firmly believe that if we're able to do this we're gonna we're gonna lead to this uh inductive research revolution where we basically to take a look at these gobs of data and start seeing correlations that we've never seen before and that's going to then lead on to a tremendous amount of follow on research to to try to improve our understanding of those environments and what about self-powered vehicles i mean you can make them autonomous but they always come home these right now for the most part you're starting to see these wave rectifiers with solar cells and other things you can just let them go they talk by a satellite they can cache data upload it and you know just go forever uh is this going to be a game changer too do you think or is there just too much power that we need to to do what we want to do i think for the sense for a lot of the sensors right now i think that we need to work on the sensors to be able to adapt them to those platforms but i think there's a great platform is long term you know we have things like ctc dds that we can get really tiny and put on those vehicles right but if we want to do some of these other kinds of analyses our instruments are still not there and so we need to kind of channel funds into that too to push those instruments to be smaller so they can go on those vehicles i was wondering with your winch if you can't just use a bladder if you made the sensor smaller instead of so heavy that would be even more innocuous and definitely yeah i mean i i go in this direction of the winch because i wanted to simplify things underwater i didn't want that that bladder system to be my problem which is a really great idea and certainly you know adjustable buoyancy is a thing to integrate into it i just decided to put all the brains up top so i can look at it and all i only think i can focus on is changing the camera out underwater but i you know if i understand your point there are some really interesting platforms that are out there for high endurance but they haven't really gotten into the deep sea yet there's some real limitations with doing that you know there's these really cool sailboats that can sail the ocean for months at a time gliders obviously can do that wave gliders and all that sort of thing but they're really working on the surface because they have to come up by the charger cells or to get navigation data if you're going to stay down deep and just stay there you a don't know where you are and but you're going to run out of power eventually so there's some real limitations to break through if it's at all possible to break through on that in the deep yeah and i might add that at any given time there are about 3,000 to 3,500 autonomous floating instruments on the ocean they're called argofloats but and they collect great data about the the ocean column the thermal properties the salt properties and things like that and and increasingly they're looking at adding biology a limitation here is that they primarily are limited to the top thousand meters of the ocean so that's good for a quarter of it on average right the other three quarters we really aren't getting with those those assets and so i think it's going to end up being some combination of surface-based apps at assets whether they're ships or autonomous craft that that are exploding in popularity right now or ROVs and AUVs as well as as in situ and fix sensors as well i mean it's it's going to be the combination of these technologies that's really going to be the breakthrough and getting them all to work together are these sensors that are out there now running off batteries like the old sonoboys or are they yep they are they have to scuttle or be recovered yeah they're they're running off of batteries generally they get recovered when the battery dies and it runs aground someplace and you know there's an address on it ship at home but these batteries are they last for several years the data bursts are pretty small okay so they're using a radium satellite to burst the data periodically the the assets mostly drop to a level in the ocean they let the ocean currents take it so they don't power themselves in their direction they're doing measurements along the way they pop up periodically they send the data up to up the satellite sends the shore then they pop back down and they're taking data again measurements and also taking the vertical measurements along the way so these things typically last for about a year and a half to two and a half years and so that's that's pretty phenomenal if you think about it and they do use the the bladder system that you mentioned for the buoyancy control yeah let's open it up for questions uh you know obviously you're always looking for low-hanging fruit and because the costs of being out at sea right off the top that's such a huge step function and I know that in our operation I haven't seen people taking advantage of what I see is really low-hanging fruit because typically the ROVs go to the bottom yes they do water column stuff but historically a vast majority of the people that use our system want to go to the bottom and then they want to stay there so it's not unusual for our vehicles to stay on the bottom for two or three days and I'm looking at that cable and I'm looking at a cable that's right under my handling system and I haven't seen people take advantage of that cable because you can ride up and down it for the price of buoyancy and you can be extremely quiet and you can stop and you can do all sorts of things in the water column and I have not seen people take advantage of that because you can get down there you can be you know as quiet as you want to be you can put on as much as lights as you want to be and ride it all the way back home and there they are to pick you up and the price is free because the cables they're already thanks for mentioning that that's a good plug Bob I talked to Adam Sewell a couple years ago about that very that very notion so for those who don't know our typical mode of operation is the two vehicle ROV system you fairly you have a fairly taut tether that goes on to the top vehicle and then more of a free tether to the bottom vehicle you can absolutely climb up and down that tether you could use some of the low-light camera systems that you're talking about buoyancy control or or even some of the some of the the mechanisms that already exist can climb up and down cables they they kind of use a a clip function to climb up and down the cable you don't want to ruin your cable these are not cheap cables so buoyancy is probably the way to go but I absolutely think that that's a total missed opportunity and it's also an opportunity that could be used anytime you're doing a traditional ctd casts on any other vessel that might be out there doing work as well I'll just add to that same vein the cable itself can be a sensor that's something that I'm working on myself so you can do is that as a you can measure temperature using fiber optics through it that sort of thing so that's a great point it's amazing what you can do in a continuous fiber and we we're doing projects in a marsh where we're getting fine-grained temperature measurements through kilometers of fiber expensive on the top end though yeah but your electronics are all up there they're fibers really cheap yeah the sense the electronics of the other story anyway more questions the vehicles are heavy should I have a football the vehicles are large and heavy there was a whole eras come and go in this field and decades ago there was a whole lot of effort in pressure tolerant electronics lots of work and it kind of came and went there were some challenges but a lot of things were developed semiconductors that could take pressure just standard resistors capacitors and so forth so I'd like to suggest if anyone wants to do it a new generation of pressure tolerant devices so we can get these things much lighter much smaller and get some more work done great comment any any response from you guys oh there's another question okay yeah we got to throw it so so while he's getting the the box throw it while he answers I I have seen a resurgence of people looking at this arena of course most of what we've been doing for a long time is wrapping things at titanium right and finding creative ways to make sure that you can either have sensors inside that titanium or even slurp materials into them into the titanium but I have seen a slight resurgence in this recently I think one of the challenges is that there's an explosion in technologies there's an explosion in communications capabilities there's an explosion in sensors there's this explosion in different types of vehicles and assets and getting a community to kind of rally around a handful of those can be quite challenging and difficult nor necessarily is it the most innovative way to do things but it but having too diffusive an approach is as bad as having a very focused approach one thing I'll add on to that is that I think where you've seen that resurgence is through uh by logging tags so like and they're getting good on at least a thousand meters if not more I think now with cameras so trying to do that and getting a few more sensors out of that but that's its own little arena reapplying that I think you know it's what you're saying would be really cool back to other vehicles there's always a compromise too because again the commercial sensors as you mentioned are so cheap you can put them everywhere if you can just do a little something to make them work I mean in a way that that has opportunity to work both ways okay thanks so first a comment for Brennan then a question so you know if I hear you correctly found sharks and volcanoes so you found sharkano which is your fundraising opportunity right there I got that in a paper title yeah all right excellent but a question for the panel though uh is is this issue of advancing sensor development right as as as you've all mentioned you can reach within reason get support to make that first generation of instruments right now you want to take it to gen two and what I have encountered in my own professional life is that there is sometimes a tendency to say well why not commercialize it so let's just I wanted to pose this question of commercialization versus non-commercialization with my impression being that commercialization and my experience being that that's a pretty hard row like a road to go down when you start thinking about the market right and how small it is so how what are your thoughts on how do we strike this balance and moving technology forward between commercialization and non-commercial opportunities between centralized programs and diffuse programs would you mind elaborating more on that sure um it's a tough one I mean my druthers would be to have everything commercialized and out in the market space and for me to be able to pick and choose in an a la carte mode those different sensors and systems that I want to be able to use uh but the government spends a lot of time investing in funding sensors Pete you and I were talking earlier about a recent call that multiple agencies are going in on looking at sensor development trying to fund some of the next latest and greatest uh my agency sits within the department of commerce and we try to make good use of something called the small business innovative research program which is intended to get things from that kind of initial napkin idea stage to the concept stage to the testing stage and ideally on to the commercialization stage but it's a really small number of things that are can successfully navigate that whole window and of course there's a number of caveats that has to be a small business and things like that but but I would encourage particularly the university set to be thinking about commercialization and supporting commercialization for those projects and the and the tools that are being supported say by agencies but that the PIs are executing from a university perspective and trying to get them in that market space but regardless of how small it is I mean with manufacturing advances today I think you can do it fairly inexpensively but the first step is kind of getting that concept tested and then you know running the trap lines of what's it going to take to commercialize and manufacture this in a way that you can actually make money I think one of the challenges for the ocean is that so if we develop a sensor and then we want to take it out to see we probably wait six months a year before we actually get out to see to test it then we find that something doesn't work so then you wait for the next cruise which might be another year and so there's this it's a huge amount of time from when you develop your sensor to test it and then you want to make a next generation system when your grants are probably finished by then and so how do you get the money to you know develop that next generation system that's probably not quite at the commercialization point I think that's where that's where my lag I feel like is in my research I agree with that Ellen so I just wanted to speak to that point and ask a question so um if you go to what's whole then in labs all over the the place there are beautiful bits of technology tucked away in cupboards where a project finished and something magical was created just to solve that particular problem and it disappears from the universe because it becomes one line in a method section that says we then develop this wonderful tool and it basically worked and one thing that would be awesome from funding agencies would be explicit support and requirement for taking those things and documenting the hell out of them right just massive documentation and open documentation of those projects and I feel like that's one thing that would really so my question then becomes taking the the the engineering and the science that we do under federal funding or private funding to some degree how do you get people to write documentation how do you get people to make open in public the the engineering work that they did in service of the science well so the the wonderful answer to your question is that the federal government has made it a responsibility and a mandate for all of the findings from any federally funded research or or engineering or development to be made public now usually there's some period of time for intellectual property considerations right but this we're talking the matter of a couple of years not a couple of decades so that's something that that came in under the obama administration that the trump administration is looking to continue so that's a that's a really good thing but I would also add that part of this is is also incumbent upon program managers when they're writing their calls for people to submit ideas for proposals to put that in as a written requirement you as a program manager can do that and the message that I'm receiving from you is that perhaps we should be doing more of that I just a slightly different question though um I get credit for we get credit for papers that we publish we don't get credit for instructables right and in order for the for the documentation that people do to be useful it needs to be valued beyond just a line I don't that's that's the distinction that's a fair point that I I don't know that I have an immediate answer to how much of the underwater research now is classified I remember back in the cold war when I was a draper uh there was the classified JASA that some of my colleagues would publish in right had a classified journal um is it much more open now I mean is the if DARPA funds you or you get DOD funding can you as readily publish the details or does it tend to clamp down well I think it really is dependent upon the problem set and the funding agent DARPA actually does a lot of things that are tremendously unclassified there there's some interesting calls that are about to come out from them that are doing some amazing things in the ocean they're looking at this kind of ocean of things call that's out right now that's all the work that's going to be done there is unclassified the application of that work might be in a classified domain or environment all the work that NOAA funds is in an unclassified setting the National Science Foundation is generally speaking in an unclassified setting if you look at the the Intel side of that's the DARPA for for Intel called Incutel their goal is to actually get people to to spur the generation of product or software that is can be publicly purchased right and then the Intel community uses it and their whole idea was that they couldn't keep up they couldn't build Intel software systems fast enough to keep up with where the software world was going so they they basically just tried to spur the creation of new software tools and new companies that they then just bought the tools from so I I can't give you an estimate because I quite frankly don't know how much of it is classified and how much of it is not but I definitely think that there's been a very large democratization of ocean science not just from a funding agency perspective and the federal government but also there's a lot of philanthropic groups out there right now there are three or four different billionaires who have their own vessels with their own ROVs or HOVs or AUVs that are that are supporting science that are supporting technology development so this is this is really exploding and you're looking at folks like Europe and the US who are looking at this thing called the blue economy about how the the ocean space is really the next great economy right whether you're looking for ship-borne commerce or recreation and tourism or fishing or as I noted previously novel therapeutics or cosmaceuticals this is the next great place hopefully we're going to do this right but this is a place where the economy is looking to explode in the next 25 years great I just tag onto that I run into the I am frustrated though by this because on the researcher end of things if I'm trying to explore a new topic that I want to address I operate exclusively in an unclassified world I don't have clearance but then I keep running into if I somebody once in a while will talk to me and I'll say well that's been done that's been done well you should maybe read this but you can't read this and it really frustrates the heck out of me and I wish there was a way that I could apply for clearance just from a research standpoint not that's because it's like a need to know thing so I can't get in there I can't join the club unless I'm somehow like have a good reason and my reason is I purely want to just learn more and this this has been fresh I don't know if you've run into this before but yeah I've just been exploring some of these like on fiber optics for example where I've just I just hit a wall and I have to come at it I spent a lot of effort trying to learn about things that I can't well ideally there's more cooperation I mean you see in the aerospace community too right where spy satellites are suddenly given to scientists to explore planetary systems so this is potentially a good sign who knows where the future goes but as you're right it's getting so democratized so fast that you know you can very quickly build your own systems although you're right they may have known about it 30 years ago Julianna this question is for Anna you mentioned that laser absorption spectroscopy is one of your main sensing methods but it cannot be conducted underwater I'm trying to understand what the technical limitation is there I know that for example there's a lot of work in underwater laser communication so presumably lasers can so the wavelengths we work at as soon as you put them through water it gets absorbed and so we can't travel the light can't travel very far in the water so that's our limitation and so we get around it by extracting the gases actually out of the water and that works for all the different techniques we work on yeah methane absorbs in the IR so it doesn't go through water but on the other hand what about NMR there are other ways to find that methane have you thought about not using optical techniques yeah we've been using some other techniques in our lab especially you can buy very small cheap sensors for a lot of gases these days and so we've been working with those which aren't IR looking at just can we take these cheap sensors and adapt them to the ocean even the chemical polymer ones I mean the electronic noses right there all polymer so the ocean tends to follow stuff but are those viable at all for well we've been using membranes again to get the gases out of out of our samples and so we've been using some solid state gas sensors and trying those so you still pull the gas out institute is tough we still pull the gas out yeah but there's some interesting technologies out there obviously sonars are able to find the bubble plumes they can of course measure volume or anything like that necessarily yet but there's also some interesting work out there using hydrophones that may be able to if done right measure the flux of the methane as it's leaving the ocean bottom so this is something that's like really emerging again this is a tough problem if you're going to use sound for this you have to basically eliminate all the other sound in order to do it well or be able to filter it out so but there's some interesting things that are that are emerging in that arena and we also to go on with what Alan said is that we use the sonar to actually find the bubbles and then if we want to measure the chemistry of them we'll then you know move to using the chemical techniques a lot of these technologies work together we don't right now we don't find them using the chemical techniques we use the sonar and then we actually do the measurements with the is it passive sonar cavitation or is it active we have a sonar right on the vehicle are you listening or is it are you sending something out and getting a return these are typically getting returns okay well the military knows how to listen for that very well so that's classified brennan other questions we get we need to you know who has it well actually you're on tape well no no that's an old word isn't it you're on stream so we have to give you the football it's real real um i just i'm really curious about you've mentioned the democratization of ocean science and then you talked about having these barriers where it takes sometimes a year to get on a ship and another year to get on a ship the second time to then after you fixed it what are the barriers to getting your equipment aboard those ships that billionaires are offering left and right for the use so i have a cruise on one of those ships this fall um on the falcor um and we're going to go out to cascading margins to do some methane measurements um one of the barriers that we applied for ship time two two and a half years before we actually get the ship time and so we're planning cruises i think we applied i want to say actually 2016 2015 2016 to get this cruise in 2018 so our lee time is pretty far out um and so at the same time we're applying for ship time we're looking for funding to support our science on that we're developing that the system and so the call just in the was in the fall for i think 2020 cruises and so you've got to be planning pretty far um out and sometimes to get on these cruises the same with applying for you and all ship time is when you put in a proposal i just put in a proposal and i asked for ship time for 2021 i mean so we're our the lee time is pretty far out and so that's one of the limitations just in the way the funding cycles work there are many new resources that make more ships available and they may not have all the technical equipment on board already but there's several of those that are available i know one in australia got named chris bone that started one that is literally that it's pairing uh public ships with private entities that need to use so one of the other limitations is that um in a lot of these environments we want to work we want to take our instruments we need deep diving vehicles and so for example i went on nautilus um last year we wanted to go to a site that was 4 000 meters and so we needed to use a deep diving submersible so we can't we're limited in what ships we can use they can have the deep diving subs and so we need both the ship and um those facilities at this point and so that's sort of one of the limitations too that's the barrier i'm trying to break so i'm trying to make everything smaller which means more boats can be used and it's easy to mobilize and that sort of thing so we'll see if it works out but yeah this this is the reason i'm going in this direction of making things as simple and as small as possible so that it doesn't become this massive effort two years out somebody can call up and say i want to go out next month i got the boat ready i'm ready too yeah it goes back to the old adage right i mean the smart person knows that you don't own a ship or a boat right you you know a friend with a ship or a boat um because the minute you own a ship or a boat and you're provisioning that ship for use you want to make sure it's maximally utilized so you can make it efficient which means that you are forced to have these time-planning horizons that are a year or sometimes longer but in a bit of a shameless but cautious plug for ourselves one of the things that we are looking to do in the coming years is to be able to use our ship time and we're just doing bathymapping operations not say rov operations when when our aft deck has space when we have empty berths on the ship of opening it up for folks in the in the technology community to test out their assets using the ship right and we've got the basic winch systems on the basic cranes things like that uh we want to do it in a minimally to interfere mode because we are out there conducting missions but there's one of the things that we're looking at we're going to do two two demonstration cases of that this year to see how that goes again that takes forward planning that's not something that can hey i've got an idea next month i want to test it but now you're talking the six to twelve month horizon versus you know the 12 month to the 36 month horizon how about running parasitically on on commercial vessels i mean they're always criss crossing the ocean they're going to be autonomous soon these freighters if you have a small payload that can make useful measurements even hijack the sonar on the vessel and use that information as well you know i'm sure you're you're talking about that so some of this already happens right so depending on what the measurements you're looking at there's any number of ships in the transportation industry the commercial transportation industry that have these things called xpt auto launchers on the back of them so you basically put the box on and it shoots a little missile like thing over the side which then as it goes down does some temperature measurements that is a white tethered to a wire then that gets stored on the ship and transmitted via satellite and also for years noa has partnered with the the cruise ship industry to actually put sensors on the ship and put scientists on the ship the scientists are then taking measurements while they're out on the cruise ship the other requirement for the scientist no cost to the scientist was that they have to give kind of science education seminars to the to the cruise ship passengers unfortunately that one's kind of fallen by the wayside because it looked a little bit too much like a junket even though good science was getting done at very low taxpayer cost but so there are things like that are happening some in more robust ways than others typically not in the deep submergence world that's a much more challenging game yeah because they're they're going on trajectories that never change and they don't roam or go where you want to go necessarily yeah true thank you do you know of any um efforts to crowdsource the development of sensors or technologies uh through challenges uh crowdsourcing uh expires or let's say using in incentive and the likes yeah so one that's going on that you've already mentioned to the expires there's the shale ocean uh I think that's called ocean discovery expires it's focused on mapping the ocean at a higher resolution when there's no ship in the loop at all just using autonomous assets whether they're ship shore based or surface based or subsurface no attacked on a million dollar prize of that competition for chemical sensing so we're looking we're looking forward to seeing what's going to come out of that it should be within about the next week or the first round winners are announced and so we'll see what they're going to be looking at for the for the second round so that's going on there is conversations by the expires community to want to do more in the ocean space this is going to be one of the big issues I think for the next decade or so uh and then the Schmidt ocean institute is is got what's called the Schmidt technology uh partners which is a sister organization to the Schmidt ocean institute and they are literally looking to fund rapid development of technologies and sensors and systems for the ocean domain I don't think that they've had a public call to date but they're starting to put together an advisory committee to to figure out what that call might look like okay the clock is rapidly winding down with t-minus 20 seconds uh so I've been encouraged to bring this to a close it's been great we can go on for another hour uh it's a great conversation and it's a great time for this kind of things we're going to learn so much more with new sensors new systems and and probe the ocean in many different ways so let's thank our panelists and uh I think we have lightning talks and demos out there so don't miss them thanks good afternoon welcome to the afternoon session on democratizing the panel I'm Andy Lipman I'm here at the media laboratory and I was volunteered to moderate this panel probably because I know the least about it so I'm a fish out of water and I promise that's the only fish joke you're going to hear there's not going to be any jokes about nets and stuff like that um but I can't help but think to to to be keying off some of the things that were said earlier about the lack of knowledge that people have about about the water I how many people read Longitude I'm sure everybody here read Longitude by Dava Sobel right but I'm not sure if you remember the introduction but the introduction to that book there's these British sailors that are sailing home on a merchant ship and for some reason one of the sailors down below not an officer thinks they're going to run into the Silly Islands okay which is an obstacle on the way to Britain from where they were going so he goes up and he tells the captain that we're gonna land the ship on the rocks and the captain who's a British captain does of course what any good British captain would do in that situation and that is he hung the sailor um a little bit later they landed on the rocks and everybody on board died except the captain who landed on the island and was killed three weeks later for his ring by somebody else who was who was on the island now okay now we're talking about people who don't really know the sea and don't really know the ocean these are sailors who didn't know the ocean and didn't know the sea Bob Ballard talked earlier about people not knowing the sea my neighbor across the street who sold me my first boat okay his wife did not like water over her head as it was said in the slide this morning and I said to him this 30 odd years ago I said well how does she take a shower she doesn't she takes baths so when he says there are people who don't like water above their head that's absolutely true last week I heard a story of a kid from the Midwest whose parents young kid parents dragged him to the seashore and threw him in the ocean and he came out spitting and said who put all that salt in it okay um that's that's the extent to which um I think this this thing is an issue and so that's what this panel is about it's democratizing the ocean it's not about giving fish the vote it's about getting people to understand and to get out and to think because the ocean is our last wilderness it's my kind of wilderness I sail and when I'm out there I'm out all by myself and it's the last place on earth where you can do that but at the same time that I'm out there by myself I'm a member of a larger community a larger community of boaters that's why any boater anywhere will come to the aid of any other boater who's in trouble doesn't matter how far away you are you divert immediately so you're alone but also part of a community and you're also enmeshed in a world of data all of the ships that are out there are contributing to the weather map when I take my boat used to take my boat there used to be a guy on the way to Bermuda who would give weather routing to all of the people who were out there on the Atlantic traveling across the Atlantic or down to the Caribbean named Herb Hilgenberg in Canada he recently retired he knew more about the weather than Noah because he had reports from all of the boats that he was routing as to what the deviations from what the models and the maps had told us so we're a member of a community where contributors of data where all of those things so I think what this panel is about is getting people out I think that what's wrong with the world today could largely be solved by getting people out of their environment out of Kansas and into their broader world into the world where the sea is not something that's surprisingly salty where it's not something that you don't know how to swim in where it's something that's intimidating and distant and far away and scary and unknowable because that's what broadens our perspective and that's what broadens our curiosity and that's what makes us people and if we fail at that then we've lost long before we run out of food and so that's what I hope we're going to explore in the course of this panel from several perspectives from the perspective of data from the perspectives of engagement from the perspectives of stories and from the perspectives of anything that you want to bring up with respect to the ocean so peak your curiosity broaden your perspective and think during the seven minutes that each panelist will spend opening up the topic of questions because there'll be plenty of questions and time for questions after that I'm gonna only say welcome Asha and each panelist will in turn introduce themselves and then tell you what they're about so thank you and we'll begin all right can you hear me wow great all right well I'm Asha Divos I'm a Sri Lankan marine biologist and I've pioneered blue well research in the northern Indian ocean so that's kind of my thing did I press something um but today I'm going to talk a little bit about my experiences in terms of ocean research and conservation and a little bit about how we can think about democratizing that space so here we go all right so I'm a marine biologist and I am completely passionate about engaging and inspiring the next generation of diverse ocean heroes and in my attempt to do so I talk about a lot of different topics one of my favorite is actually whale poop that's whale poop up here um and why whale poop because it's beautiful it's memorable it's engaging it's an opportunity to educate people it's fun and transcends all boundaries and it gets a reaction and to me those are some of the fundamental key ingredients that we all have to have when we're trying to communicate outside the bubble that we actually live in apart from this I also do a number of other things I mentor students particularly from the developing world I take students out on expeditions I um run an informal monthly gathering of the general public and we discuss marine conservation issues and everyone's expected to read a scientific paper before they attend this event and they actually do which is quite remarkable um I'm starting an artist residency on my boat my research platform because I want to bring the arts into the sciences I um also um engage with media in the local languages in Sri Lanka and I work with social media because that's really where the world hangs out apart from that I've also set up the first marine conservation research and education organization in Sri Lanka called Ocean Swell and the reason I did this was again because I come from an island and you think everybody had some connection to the ocean but the vast majority of people don't even swim and for me this lack of ocean literacy is actually a big problem and it's my work that actually started a marine conservation movement in the island um but I want to see that continue and as I say when I die I don't want it to end so how do I make sure that what I do is actually sustainable into the long term when I was setting up Ocean Swell last year a lot of people asked me why I would choose to set up such an entity in such a remote part of the world and I found this question interesting but also quite symbolic the problem is that we've come to expect marine conservation to be done in countries like you know in North America in Europe in Australia and those are the places it happens and it doesn't happen in the rest of the world right and this is obviously problematic and because from the way I see it you know my big thing is what if the solution to our greatest ocean challenge is trapped in the mind of a student from the developing world and this is not something that's too far from the truth or not impossible because honestly about 70% of our coastlines are actually in the developing world but of course when I attend ocean related events as you can all probably imagine I'm faced with the harsh reality that the vast majority of people around me are not from those 70% of the countries representation is next to nothing and in fact who the representation is from the 30% of the countries who then go on to make decisions on behalf of 100% of the countries and this is not a sustainable model quite frankly if we really want to save the oceans we need every coastline needs a hero a local hero someone who speaks the language someone who understands that stretch of the ocean someone who can communicate with the communities can engage can come up with local solutions and in the long term someone who's actually going to be there and remain there and that's incredibly important so local people are so important to the health of our coastlines but oftentimes they're ignored and dismissed and instead parachute science where western scientists come into the developing world and do research and leave with no investment whatsoever no training is what happens more often than not and that cripples these communities but also it really derails our conservation efforts so why is it that we have such little representation from these parts of the world well there's a whole host of things but here's a couple of important points first of all like I said we've come to believe that marine conservation is a part of the privileged because if you don't have the biggest vessel or the fanciest equipment to go out and do incredible research then you're not pushing boundaries and that means it's not really worthwhile and we've come to judge the quality of science based on that innovation that pushing of boundaries that that quality of data or how much data is coming out but we haven't stopped to appreciate how much how hard it can be to actually work in the other parts of the world perhaps someone might go out and get two you know sightings for whale over a year versus in a small robot versus someone who's gone out in a massive big vessel and collect a hundred sightings but how do we value what that science is what's better what's more important what should be published what shouldn't be published and these are all questions that we should be asking and then of course this work gets published publications I'm horrible jargon most of us don't even enjoy reading those papers I certainly don't and then they're locked behind paywalls right so this is the this is the honest truth they're locked behind paywalls and so people don't have access and then we complain that the vast majority of the world doesn't care for the oceans doesn't engage with the oceans won't involve themselves at conservation but then we aren't even allowing them to have access to the information that can allow them to make better decisions right so there is distinctly a problem in how we're engaging these communities and how we're kind of telling our stories and getting things out there oh I pressed the button I didn't want to press there you go and I warned you guys see that was an example of what not to do um so so how can we change this well we need to you know lift this tank or this lid of over this tank blue of blue water and let everyone slip in right so we need to take everyone to the HMS Hermes which was the first purpose built aircraft carrier that was sunk off the east coast of Sri Lanka we should be taking people to this fascinating place in honey farrow bay in the Maldives to see witness the largest gathering of manta rays in the world or how about taking them to the only place in the world where you can see the largest land mammal and the largest marine mammal in the space of two hours Sri Lanka right these places exist but for so long what are we talking about the seven wonders of the world because this world only has seven wonders and they only exist on land this is so inaccurate we're underselling this incredible magical kingdom that we have at our fingertips so why are we not taking people to these places and letting them experience it for sure there's like a lot of tools out there and these tools need to be affordable accessible and they do have to transcend all barriers whether they're language or age or whatever it is we have to think about how we're getting what tools we're using and at the end of the day what it might be is just a game a game where people are learning without feeling like they're learning and a connection to the ocean in every pocket perhaps that's what we're looking at at the end I mean I guess the big questions are how do we make the ocean a priority for people who can't spend their days worrying about it who don't have the privilege that you and I do how do we engage with people how do we make it relevant to everyone how do we allow people to dream and engage with the ocean even if in the reality of their life they have to work their father's patty field for till they're dying day right that's what we need to be thinking about and so for me you know I really am drawn to these faces I see them and I think how can I make that man who's walking down the street perhaps on his way to work he's got a lot on his mind but how can I make him think about the ocean as his interlude his respite and his escape because at the end of the day my dream is that everyone will talk about the ocean at least once a day what I want is for people to gossip about the ocean because 70 percent of our planet is ocean but really how many of us know what lies beneath thank you hello okay I think I have to wait for them to change the slides but so hi everyone my name is Shah Selby I'm a conservation technologist which I'll kind of explain what that is and why it's a it's its own term as I as I talk about some of the work that we do so is that the first one oh yeah there's me so so I started an organization called conservative high which is a non-profit technology development lab place and we we put it in in the place where everyone thinks about when they think about wildlife conservation which is downtown Los Angeles and we what we do there is we build technologies to help conservationists and scientists better monitor understand protect this planet and and the reason why we're focused solely on that is because of a few things I'll talk a little bit about where we are in the technology landscape but but the but the other side of it is is a lot of what what Asha was talking about is in many parts of the world outside of these borders it's very expensive to to be able to measure and protect these environments right the tools that are currently available are just kind of absurdly priced there there's they're offered by just a few companies and and typically they're in the in the past they were developed off of proprietary designs and and sold for whatever they wanted to sell for but we now live in a time where where technology is changing rapidly incredibly rapidly you know this there's many people in this room that had all of this these devices right and and people used to spend a fortune on this sort of stuff right now we all carry a computer in our pocket that does literally everything on that slide and and the time span at that these things are changing is is incredible and it's astronomical and it allows us to do a lot of really amazing things um and so that's what we focus on um one of the things that we try and do with the work that I do is everything that we develop is open source so you know if we design something we put the designs and the code and everything um on the internet for anybody to use but more importantly when we're working with communities in different parts of this world we we teach the folks that we're working with how to build it how to maintain it how to you know make their own modifications of it and we basically hand it off and and you know the goal of my organization is is basically to always write us out of the projects that we're working on right is because I would rather work on something that builds the capacity globally for us to solve some of these problems as opposed to being the sole provider of drones or xyz for you know conservation purposes so um so some of the stuff that we work on is drones and and I like to talk about drones because it both demonstrates the potential of how fast this technology you know development can can fundamentally change the work that we do but it also demonstrates the pitfalls so um I got a grant from National Geographic in 2013 to work on drones and when I started the grant we were we're doing drones for coastal conservation purposes that was the the purpose of the grant and when we started it made more sense for us to build drones because there wasn't a lot out there it was expensive and it didn't really have the capabilities we wanted to but by the end of the grant the industry had changed so much that it just made more sense to buy the stuff that we needed um and and that's like really how fast that changed and I mean everybody here has heard about how popular this technology is you know some of you guys maybe got it for Christmas or your birthday or something um and and that's fantastic because now we have this great technology tool all across the world but the problem is now people think that drones are going to solve all their problems right so when we work with the community more times than than I'd like to admit I've walked into it and they said oh we need a drone for this you know and it turns out that like most of the time they don't so as an organization we walk back with them and we say okay what's your real problem what are you really trying to solve and let's see if we can move forward and and figure out what it is and it typically isn't drones but sometimes it's drones we do a lot of work with creating low-cost electronics so um some of the stuff that we're doing this year specifically is is GPS tracking of sharks and and whales both in Belize and Antarctica and so we create low-cost open-source units that that we're able to kind of sell for that um uh work with the scientists to to deploy that sort of stuff um we we worked with NOAA um this last year to create a low-cost ctd device so those of you who don't know what that is that's conductivity temperature depth sensor um and so we'll be deploying that a lot with some scientists that couldn't afford the really expensive versions of of the ctds that that are that are usually um made um another great example of of using low-cost methods and technology development to do a lot of great stuff comes out of a colleague of mine whose name is Tofer White who created this this project called Rain Force Connection so it's not ocean related but basically they take old donated cell phones they put microphones on it and they put in the Rain Force to listen for illegal logging so we got a grant actually through National Geographic as well to collaborate on bringing that same sort of technology into into the oceans and how it would work in the oceans and we've we've took a derivative of that that Rain Force Connection hardware and put it on some buoys and deployed them in different places to listen um underwater and try and specifically what we're looking for is trying to detect um fishing activity in places where it's not supposed to be happening so but just based solely off the the acoustic signature and um machine learning and some of the other techniques that we're using for that technology but you could tell a lot from the underwater acoustics as people here mostly know um and and lastly a thing that we work a lot on is is sensors so i'm really trying to bring down the cost of sensor technologies that's used in in conservation um science and citizen science efforts and so we have uh this this uh this platform that we call FieldKit where we've been developing a lot of this stuff um a lot of the how this usually happens in in uh in practice is you know some organization or a scientist comes to us and they say hey we want to develop a sensor that does or we we want to censor it does this but the only version that we can buy costs five thousand ten thousand thirty thousand whatever it ends up being and so we'll go back and try and design an open source version of that and so we've done that a number of times um and we're building a library that that we're publishing this year um online of of the sensor designs we've done to date and some of the ones that we're going to do moving forward that can test for things like water quality flow and um all sorts of stuff depending on on the organizations that we've worked on and the FieldKit platform kind of allows a way to visualize that data and collect that data as well um and and i'm not going to talk too much of this because we have uh we have crowdsourcing and citizen science experts coming up after me but that this is another area where there's a lot of potential in using technology to democratize the the work that we do in the oceans it's really engaging the public and giving them the tool through through things like apps and and low cost devices that they can go out and gather a lot of this information um themselves so conservation technology i said i'm going to explain a little bit what that is this this is emerged as something that you know a handful of us do throughout the world that's focused solely on bringing these like recent innovations in technology and kind of lower cost methods into conservation you know technology has always been a part of science and conservation in some aspect or another but we've never really been in this point where um the ability for us to do things at at actual really low costs and the capabilities that those stuff have it's never been better than it is today and it's only getting even even more um more amazing as time goes on so all these big buzzwords that you guys hear about um about what's happening in the technology space things like blockchain and computer vision dna barcoding there's folks um that i you know that i know that are working on these sorts of things and adapting them into the the conservation space the ocean conservation space so there's a lot of potential there um and then the other thing that's really amazing about where we're at is there's opportunities to take that that idea that you might have or um or the the problem that you want to work on and find ways to get them funded and this is something that was hard earlier but now there's so many people who are excited about the idea of using technology to solve some of these problems that a lot of like the foundations and other organizations will fund them or do interesting stuff so in in 2015 i i had an idea that i came to national geographic for about creating a prize for um for the protection of marine protected areas using lower cost technology and engaging the community and this kind of stuff and so it took us some time to develop it but but national geographic launched this marine protection prize um earlier this year or last year anyways that it just closed the the registrants just closed and it's the the feedback we had from it and the amount of participants is amazing it's five times bigger what than what i expected to actually apply for this sort of prize which shows there's like a desire and there's a passion around creating solutions to some of these problems okay i'm almost done just nearly done and then the other the other amazing thing is that there's there's now platforms and in places where you can go to gain this sort of help and gain expertise so if you have an idea for developing technology but you don't necessarily have the coding expertise or something like that there's places like conservation x labs has this digital uh makerspace where you can go and and kind of explore some of these ideas and there's communities like wild labs dot net that allows you to kind of meet with people who are interested in this sort of thing and and very quickly last i'll say i'm one of the judges on the ocean x prize or the ocean mapping x prize and so this is really neat because they're they're trying to map the entire oceans and do it in a way that's cheaper and different than the ways that they've done it before and so there's you know there's 19 teams now that are doing this work and and there's a lot of really interesting innovation there so i think it's a very exciting time for technology in this space wow wow you guys are amazing my name is greg trinish i'm the founder and executive director of adventure scientists and very happy to be here so i started my career as an explorer i traveled all around the world in different environments trying to learn what i could from pushing myself to the limits of exploration and while it was out there i did that and i also saw a lot of challenges along the way i saw firsthand the people and the environments that are struggling with so many of the things that we've talked about over the last few days here things like coral bleaching illegal logging causing deforestation wildlife trafficking harmful algal blooms shark finning the list goes on and on and on and on i knew that there was tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people like me who go outside every single day they love the places that they explore and if given the opportunity they would choose to make a difference with the time outside from my experience in the sciences i knew that there was also a tremendous need for a boots on the ground army and so we started adventure scientists with this mission to send people who are traveling in the outdoors who love the outdoors are willing to go through some training to go out and collect data where it can be used to address environmental issues so today we have sent thousands of people all around the globe on expeditions to seven continents five oceans people have done things as diverse as collecting the highest known plant life on earth for Mount Everest at 22 000 feet we've gone down 527 feet below the ocean surface we've collected more than samples from more than 3000 places for our micro plastic study and that's just the beginning of what's possible so i'll ask you guys as we're going through the rest of these slides to think about how you could benefit from a global network of volunteers how an army of people on the ground in the water could benefit your work and what you would do with that unlimited resource for harvard medical school we collected scat samples all around the world in order to isolate the genes responsible for enter for antibiotic resistance in the enterococcus genus bacteria so the theory is because they're one of the oldest on the planet and also one of the most prolific it's likely that if you could address or you could find the common ancestor of this genus you could probably turn off antibiotic resistance and many other species around the globe this week we're launching a project with the world resources institute that will have volunteers traveling from san diego to vancouver sampling big leaf maple as the first of many species that we will begin to collect samples for so we're collecting leaves and cores in order to create genetic reference libraries to make it possible as technology advances with dna barcoding and handheld dna sequencers to be able to walk into a furniture store someday in the future zap a table and instantly know what species you're looking at where it came from and whether it was legally or illegally harvested that will make it far more difficult to transport illegal timber all around the globe and will eventually end that issue so we have this global network and we actually don't know how big our network is we have never maxed it out and so we've never had more people or excuse me we never had less people than we've needed for any given mission we're not about getting as many people involved as possible or getting as many folks out there because we really focus on the quality of the data we work with our partners to develop a scientific mission we figure out how many samples are needed how many volunteers are needed in order to get those samples and that's who we deploy to get out there we get our networks by recruiting top tier athletes from each sport so this is lakey peterson number four female surfer in the world mike lebecci netgeo coverboy jeremy jones greatest snowboarder that's probably ever lived and we asked these people to go out become ambassadors for our projects and then they share it through popular media through their social media accounts and that helps us to recruit this unlimited army all around the world national geographic has been a huge help for us in that spreading the word about what we do and helping us recruit volunteers every single volunteer goes through a training process so they may do that online we use learning lms or learning management systems same things that big corporations use to train their employees we also supplement those quite often within field training so these can last anywhere from one day to seven days really just pen depends on the complexity of the protocols that volunteers need to follow when they're out in the field every volunteer passes the test you have to get 100 on the test to be certified to collect data for us and then you have to research that test every six months so we make sure that our volunteers are staying up to date on the protocols when they're in the field they're often wearing go pros as body cams so we can actually see whether they were following the protocols when they collected the sample we have apps that ask them if they're following those same protocols in the field so we are able to ask things like did you cap your water bottle under water just reminders that guide people through the process as they're moving through the process perhaps the most important thing about what we've learned from running more than 150 of these projects now is choosing the right types of projects so anything where you can deploy a sensor like this one Shaw bill although that's pretty old and he's probably mad at me for showing that because it's old or camera chap whatever it is anywhere where there's a technology that our job is really to train the volunteer how to use the technology how to troubleshoot the technology those work really well and then anything where there's a sample collection whether it's air water whatever it is we're happy to go out train people how to not contaminate those samples and then they often end up in a lab where the real analysis is happening so the real beauty of this is what it allows us to do from a scale standpoint we're able to go all over the world and bring back samples we're able to send people who are already out there paying their own way to go on these expeditions we can recruit people to go to specific locations as well and just to zoom into the coast of west africa here to give you a better sense of the resolution that we've been able to do for our micro plastic study which instead of talking about i will share a little bit more about since this is an oceans conference after all and there is sound on that five years ago we scooped up a half liter of water locally brought it back to the institute looking under the microscope and seeing all these technicolored pieces of plastic led me to think of all of these larger questions how is it affecting the ocean our drinking water our micro plastics everywhere but i couldn't answer those on my own so this is when i partnered with adventure scientists adventure scientists is a nonprofit organization that unites explorers and scientists to solve some of the world's most pressing environmental issues in which access to data is crucial to resolving them i worked with adventure scientists to train adventurers who would be collecting data for me around the world i'm about to take a micro plastic sample i was able to get water samples from the antarctic and the middle of the pacific through the process of working with adventure scientists i was getting closer to understanding the magnitude of this issue after analyzing thousands of samples from around the world we concluded that 74 percent of them contain micro plastic pollution micro plastics are one of the largest pollution problems that you've never seen without adventure scientists i would have never been able to even dream about this breadth of data that i've been able to collect the adventure scientists model lends itself to so many different projects whether it be micro plastics or forestry conservation or animal protection this is just the beginning so i just want to leave you with two more thoughts one is as we come up with these new technologies things like hummingbirds flying around the forest to monitor wildlife in all kinds of miniaturized and cheaper and more effective ways to monitor let's not lose sight of the fundamental importance of getting people out into nature and connecting people to these places if we want them to care about them and the second is just another reminder come tell us how you can benefit from an unlimited army of boots on the ground or fins in the water thanks hello hello this is oh good okay so my name is annie brett and i am a sailor and a scientist and i'm also a lawyer so feel free to throw tomatoes at me or otherwise express your anger at all the lawyers in life so i'm going to try and go pretty quick here so we actually have some time for discussion so if i raced or anything feel free to you know ask me questions later but so i spend a lot of my time at the intersection of science and law and thinking about this broader trend that we're seeing in science and scientific exploration in particular towards democratization and you know shan greg discussed this technology has made this realm of science really accessible to people in a way that's unprecedented in the past and in the face of this kind of general public involvement in scientific data collection there's huge potential for understanding our environment in ways that we have never been able to before but so what i'm really interested in is how we turn this scientific data into actual legal usable policy solutions and it turns out there are significant barriers to using scientific data that's collected by non experts in policy contexts and lawyers are really bad at science we don't really understand it so we use some interesting proxies to try and determine when scientific data is reliable and one of the biggest proxies one of our favorite proxies is looking at the educational background of the person who collected the scientific data so in cases where we're talking about citizen science projects this can be a huge barrier to actually using scientific data in legal regulatory and courtroom contexts regardless of how accurate the data actually is the fact that it was collected by someone who doesn't have formal scientific training often is enough to make fatal flaws in that data's ultimate use there are obviously ways to do this and there is this kind of circle in the middle and i think greg's projects are a great example of how you can structure projects effectively to gather citizen science data in ways that can be used in legal contexts and you know there's a whole slew of different ways to do this i think having very good volunteer training is one of them having routine validation with professional scientists who come and compare their data to volunteer data making sure that projects are well funded and staffed over time so there's a scientific record i'm happy to go into all of these different um measures in a lot more detail if you guys are interested in how projects can be effectively structured to inform management solutions but at the risk of putting myself out of a job here what i really want to argue for today is that we think about democratic data in a different way and i think my big question is what happens when we separate democratically collected data from these silos that we're trying to put it into and so if we think of democratic data not through a scientific lens or a legal lens i think what we find is that data from the global population of particularly ocean users is one of our best means of gathering information about the state of the ocean it helps us to be the first line identification of environmental problems and to really target solutions going forward iana earlier today on a panel mentioned that it's critical that we uh triage our resources and we have limited resources and limited ability to make policy solutions so we really have to focus on the issues that are the most pressing and what i would argue is that democratic data is one of the best ways that we can really figure out how to triage and how to identify the most pressing problems and we have a huge network of ocean experts out there from ships captains who have been sailing for 50 years to coastal communities who rely on ecosystems in the ocean for their sustenance and livelihood and these users may not have the scientific data and the legal data that we need to make end goal policy decisions but they do have the information that will help us bring in scientific teams and policy teams to places that need that help the most so i think what i want to leave you guys with and then we can discuss this more is this idea that if we move beyond an idea of scientific truth as the only goal in our democratic data collection and our democratizing of the ocean and engage all these as of the ocean this is a map of shipping routes global shipping routes so these are constantly traveled and these people have a significant amount of information about the ocean we don't have to give them any scientific instruments we don't have to give them new methods we don't have to fund them at all they're already out there and they already have a significant amount of information it's not scientific data it's not ultimate truth but it's information that can help guide our management solutions and our policy solutions towards more effective ends and so i want to think about is how we can really engage these people and use their information to identify environmental problems and triage our management solutions thank you is this one on i've uh i can't help but think that uh you know if you drive a car today that car knows and can report almost everything about the environment around you it knows if it's raining it knows if it's light it knows what the barometric pressure is it knows what the temperature is and all that and i can't help but think why we don't have hundreds of coastal heroes all armed with exactly that kind of thing that we can build into some package that we could give both the scientists and the layman and and make some kind of usable network out of everyone and by building that network maybe get people a little bit more engaged what is that a reasonable kind of thing we should be thinking about yeah i think it absolutely is and i think there's opportunities to do that and at the same time i think it's really important that we pay attention to the fact that we can't be all things to all people at all times and so to is to put your car out there try we can try that's right to put your car out there and have it be a sensor and reporting back to google or whoever's gonna own your car someday that i was thinking of my swim trucks i don't know if i want those data you're collecting well i have a freezer full absolutely but i mean for me i think it's really neat that we have all these tools but imagine if you know the problem is that vast majority of people don't even know about the ocean right we have this weird thing where people are more connected with outer space and what's happening out there than they are with what's typically at our doorstep and for me i find that really interesting because then we have all these tools but we we can't get them into people's hands we can't because they don't even know what the importance of their role is or they don't understand that they don't have a foundation in what's actually going on out there and i think that's you know such an important thing to have that foundation before we can empower them to then become part of this network that can help solve these issues i agree with you and but you know space is easy you just look up and you got it right the ocean like you can't see past the horizon but one of the things that does tie us together between land and sea is the weather because that's that's intimately connected to both and that's why i keep coming back to the notion of the weather as being part of the connective tissue that would do it but let's remember i told warned you that you were supposed to peak your curiosity and prepare questions so who's first and by the way don't be intimidated by this but if you're going to ask a question you have to catch and i have to throw sorry i wasn't looking i was unclear if it wasn't for me anyway um so i was just curious i think a number of you talked about the need to get people like uh physically engaged with the environment to start really caring about these projects do you think it's necessary to be physically in these locations especially if they're like inaccessible or hard to get to or do you think technology can have a role in making people more engaged in yeah i mean i i think technology can definitely have a role and and people often talk about vr and ar and things like that to in bringing people into experiencing certain things and i think you know people use smartphones every single day constantly so there there's some there is a role of technology in engaging people but i think there's also something about being out in the field and being you know in these areas and i understand we can't take everybody to some of these most pristine places but but but we can still do a better job at engaging folks near those places i mean it if you i was doing some work 20 minutes outside of of yosemite with some students out there and the in the students grew up in the area and had never been to yosemite there are 20 minutes away you know so i think if we can get people out and engage in that way that can have a big impact as well beyond technology i just want to add i i agree i think getting out there obviously like all of us we we love being in the field there's a reason for it it's the sort of all these other things as well as the region of germination it's a whole lot of things but i also have i think we have to always remember that not everyone has the privilege of getting outside right like we talk from a very we've talked from a place of privilege for sure and there's a lot of people whose priorities are not about just having a great time outdoors which is why in places like Sri Lanka when i said i want to be a marine biologist people are like what are you going to do because the ocean was a place of extraction it's a vocational space that's where you go people get that's their livelihood but what i want to do seemed frivolous it was you're going to sit on boats and look at whales how is that a job how is that useful and so i think we have to also think about right if we can't get everyone out there how do we make sure everyone has that connection that's why i say you know connection to the ocean in every pocket that is that role of technology that that will allow us to take these spaces to people as opposed to always expecting people to be able to come to those spaces go ahead toss it ash i wanted to kind of further that discussion a little bit in your every person that you want to connect to the ocean i wonder if currently they are connected to any other environmental issues you think and that they're just missing the ocean or is there a whole class of people that can't care about any part of the environment whether they can see it or not because they are more concerned about you know getting food or paying their bills or things like that i think there's a large part of the population of the world that doesn't have time to indulge in like i said what we can we consider serious issues but they just seem frivolous to people because survival is such an important thing right and that that is something that we also have to understand when we're trying to drive our messages how do we allow it to be and that's why i've said how can we allow it to be their escape almost right where we're talking about the ocean so our messaging shouldn't always be doom and gloom that's the other thing because if we're trying to get people to escape from that daily rigor of their life but we want them to connect with this space and then talk about it it can't be a space where they go to and they're just like god this sounds like hell right fair enough we don't want them to feel like they're writing in obituaries or reading in obituary constantly so how do we engage people with that in mind and i think that's really quite important as well i mean i think the answer is drones by the way yeah i i i think i i think that there is a specific issue it is it is more difficult in getting people to to care about the oceans that didn't grow up right next to the oceans it's a bit more of a leap than than you know terrestrial type stuff i work in both spaces and it's a lot easier for people unfortunately just average people to care about elephants than than whales at least just in my you know meeting people across the world which it shouldn't be and so that's something we have to figure out is how to get people to be more engaged in that i'm highly sympathetic to caring about the ocean i spend all the time that i can on the ocean and in the ocean and i always have but i also care about the people and i wasn't kidding about the drones because yes i know that we can't bring everyone from Kansas or the interior of Sri Lanka even though that's an island into the sea but we can bring in ways today that are cost effective the experience of the sea into them and sooner or later you're gonna trip on it sooner or later you're gonna land in water and sooner or later it's gonna have an impact on you and i can't help but think that there is something we can do about that who's next how far can i toss this thank you um as someone from the aquarium space i'm listening to this and i'm thinking aquariums have existed for decades to accomplish this connection to inspire people about the oceans to to educate them and increasingly to tell the public what they can do to make a difference uh and to help protect the oceans uh and yet obviously the job isn't done are there any things that you all would like to see aquariums doing that we aren't doing now that you think would better accomplish this objective you're talking about at a time when we really need the public to care and to change behavior and policy and and whatnot to make a difference well uh if philanthropy will go up then then then we can look at that even the metropolitan has taken to charge you know we do actually offer free admission to certain groups and to children to you know whenever we can but it's a good point who wants to try that okay i'll jump in and just say that as someone who spent a lot of time sailing on the ocean and in really blue water places i think it can be frustrating to see the aquarium and actually kind of universal focus on the very charismatic colorful fish and things like that and i think that perspective can in turn lead to people not prioritizing some of the most important places in the ocean the deep sea the uh the high seas and if that mindset of interest and engagement with the ocean as a whole can be established in aquariums i think that would be a really cool and valuable thing to make people realize that it's not just you know the teeny coral reef that matters but it's the entirety of the ocean and there actually is stuff there you know it's not just an empty wasteland um thank you so much for uh sharing your work with us and my question is in addition to democratizing information about the ocean um how can we democratize information about and maybe this is already kind of wrapped in but how the ocean impacts people's lives even if they're not coastal but just the importance of the the ocean as the ecosystem and how because i think it's important to to show people in their day to day lives like you know whether it's the fish that they're eating or whether it's the air that they're breathing the importance of the ocean in that and the other question um is around democratizing the um ability to impact um what's happening to the ocean so this gets to kind of advocacy and empowerment maybe some of the legal issues as well but how are we able to once people are educated they can connect it to their own communities how can they then act in a way that helps to protect the the ocean as well as their livelihood i just wanted to say i i think i think that's important for us to figure this out um you know ocean conservation runs into the same challenges just regular conservation does and the fact that um we need to explain the urgency of the things that are happening without being too um you know doom and gloom all the time because it's very easy to kind of fall into that um so so showing beautiful images explaining the importance of the ocean in you know the global climate without making it to the whole climate's going to collapse and everything's and you know explaining people the need to think about what they're eating without explaining that like you know scaring them away from seafood well i mean it's okay if we scare them away from seafood but but like you know make them feel horrible about eating um sushi from 7-eleven and things like that like it's a hard balance to try and figure out and it's really because the oceans feel so remote to so many people it's much more important that we think through that and we do that um in the right way they're gonna feel awful anyway after eating sushi from 7-eleven um there's also great groups out there like so i live in montana i am pretty far from an ocean um and there's great groups like the in the ocean coalition is a group formally the colorado ocean coalition that does exactly this they talk about the connection between mountain environments and the ocean environments uh there is you know what we did with the micro plastics project is another great example of people who had no idea that this stuff was ending up in the oceans but because they were part of the data set whether in freshwater or in the oceans they went on to invest their lives and their labor and their personal ability to make a difference in these issues so 83 percent of our volunteers on the micro plastic projects have gone on to do beach cleanups they've gone on to have started their own nonprofits focused on micro plastics these people are engaging in projects like like ours and many many others around the world and then going on to make a difference and and i think that those connections are becoming more and more clear every day uh it to me is you got to go beyond just getting people to go look at the aquarium to go back to your question you got to go beyond just getting people to look at the pictures and interact with the technology you have to have people really invest in these and and most people aren't going to invest with money very few people are going to invest with much more than an occasional uh volunteer tour here or there but if we can give people easy ways to invest what they have whether it's their smartphones or their personal labor or their weekends or whatever it is they have to give that's how we're going to get people to really be united in mobilizing against the challenges we face and i just want to add i mean i think you're absolutely right because i think humans are inherently um selfish we're driven by our ego and if it's affecting us that's the only time we're actually going to start to care right so in our messaging it is important to bring it back to us humans um that's incredibly important and the connectivity you know we always say that all roads lead to Rome but in fact all waterways lead to the ocean right so doesn't matter if you live in a mountain but what what what are the stories that we can tell or how can we show that connectivity to people that their actions up there have an impact down there and then you know talking about whale poop because it is one of my favorite things to talk about um the reason i talk about it is for all those reasons but also you know um i have a TED talk called why you should care about whale poop and the whole point is basically it's the ocean fertilizer 50 to 70 percent of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean so we should really be thanking whales and their whale poop because they fertilize the oceans that allow for photosynthesis that allow for oxygen right you start telling stories like that people just like oh like poop like gross and then you get to the end of the story and they're like oh that's really interesting so we need to be clever about our messaging too and we need to be connect we need to help them to connect to whatever is going on up there and to care and that's i mean that's what we as scientists certainly i'm a scientist have just not been doing we're so busy trying to turn over papers that get published and just filed away but we're not translating that into something that's actually usable on the ground and if the use is just the fact that someone will learn a story that they'll tell another person that'll tell another person that in itself is a huge action that can have knock on effects down the line actually we're doing quite a lot some of it with katie on changing the scientific publishing process to be one that engages people in the act of not critiquing but collaborating and that potentially builds a virtuous circle where you're educating the people as well as influencing the science that goes on so you can make papers that hopefully are not necessarily dry and locked up and never read uh oh boy i don't think actually we just published that microplastics data set it actually was published this morning but we've also open source the data set or made it available publicly at least so we've had 76 requests for that data set and we just share it with anybody who really wants it for an educational conservation or scientific purpose so we it's not quite open source in that we do screen who's using it but anybody who can benefit the world from it in any of those different ways we gladly share it and we've had amazing people come and ask for it including governments of of countries uh slovenian government reached out for that data set um which was god bless i think that's wonderful you should probably send some of the water itself to the schools all through the country and let them explore it and discover it for you yeah so asha and annie you both alluded to ways structural ways in which it's difficult to do knowledge production outside the developed world or even within the developed world outside of academic institutions or even just to lead academic institutions and so since we're at mit i was wondering if you had any thoughts on what a place like mit could or should be doing to make their science more democratic so i just think in general when it comes to science i think we need to stop thinking we're so special and that we speak a special language and i think every publication should come with a an abstract that's in layman english which frankly makes it sound like we're dumbing it down but we're not the challenge is for us to actually learn how to communicate broader so i think that's a very simple first step and all journals should be expecting that at the very least and i just think there's a whole host of things that can be done from just like how do we retell those stories how do we make sure that if you are publishing you're committing to putting it out in some other form as well i mean in Sri Lanka not a single university has access to journals i just want you to know that and so you know we again you know people who publish and are constantly publishing i live in a bubble where you can access papers whenever you want and i'm a i'm a scientist i've been in big institutions all my life i've moved back to Sri Lanka now and i have to write to friends to access papers that shouldn't be the case so how can i innovate in science if i don't even know what's happening on the ground like what's the foundation that i can build on so i mean they should all just be open access you know i i i yeah i mean i i have a small non-profit and i don't have access to those journals you know and so it's the same process that i have to do for that and it's it's completely absurd that we'd lock away all the knowledge in these towers and we don't let anyone else see it that's what motivated a lot of our publishing work by the way they're a rip-off for the scientists who have to review the stuff for nothing and then you people have to buy it and the only people who get rich are the journals so we said why don't we bypass those journals so we are and Stephen Jay Gould of course was a champion of scientific writing that was made for people to understand i wish he were still here i'll just add that i think we as scientists and as a community at these elite institutions do privilege science and we think it is this amazing source of knowledge that is the only source of knowledge and that's not to say that science does not have a huge amount to contribute but recognizing other forms of knowledge traditional knowledge is something that the legal and policy systems try to do usually uh it's a process that's not super successful but it's an attempt and i think as scientists one of the most important things we can do is realize that our scientific answers are not ultimate truth and those are constructions of the way that we do science and the way that we understand scientific standards but if we as scientists can recognize that there are other perspectives that are equally valuable in many cases to our own scientific knowledge that is a really important part of structuring solutions in effective ways and getting the information that we need to get to those solutions we've given you the last word Annie i want to thank Asha and Sean Greg and Annie and i hope the rest of you and your perspectives have been enhanced as well thank you and on