 My name is Jörg Brunschweiler. On behalf of ETH Zurich, I welcome you to this event here at UC Berkeley. Let me first thank our host UC Berkeley. Very good friends of ETH. Lots of collaboration between individuals, professors, students exchange, but also in the context of YARU, the International Alliance of Research Universities, of which both of these fine institutions are members of. Now, this is part of a series of events which has been going on in the past few days here in the Bay Area of San Francisco. There's actually going to be another event of the series ATO meets California this afternoon here also at UC Berkeley on earthquakes. Another important topic, an interesting topic and you're more than welcome to also join this one. There's flyers lying there and please pick up one. Now, I'm really excited about this particular event. I learned about this about two years ago when I read an article in Nature. I didn't know about the project, obviously. I didn't know the involvement of Matthias Royer et al. And that was actually, I think on the way back from Fiji, I do spend quite a bit of time in Fiji and do research there. So I'm naturally attached and feel very comfortable with those kind of pictures which you saw before of these nice ecosystems. And I'm really looking forward to learn more about this exciting project. So I hand over to Neil. Thank you very much. Thanks so much. Yes, so my name is Neil Davies. I'm a senior fellow here at BIDS and executive director of Berkeley's research station in Morayah, the Gump station. So first of all, thanks to BIDS, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science for hosting us here and Eric for this great space that we have. And I'm going to introduce each of the speakers as we go through the presentation. But at the end, Russell Schmidt, who's a professor at UC Santa Barbara, will say a few concluding remarks and moderate a short question and answer session. But first of all, it's a pleasure to recognize the collaboration we have with ETH Zurich and to kick off the first presentation, a remote presentation from Nicholas Gruber, who's pre-recorded his presentation with Matthias Munich. Matthias Munich is here on the robot somewhere. He's here on the screen to respond to questions afterwards. But first of all, we'll pick off the video. I just want to mention that we are live streaming the event and we also will have a Twitter hashtag. The hashtag is ETH2, the number two, CAL for California, ETH2Cal. Good afternoon, a warm welcome. My name is Nicky Gruber and I'm a professor for environmental physics here at ETH Zurich. And I give this presentation together with Matthias Munich, who's a senior researcher in my research group. When we think about Moria, then we usually think about the coral reefs and the wonderful location this island provides to people. But as a species that normally lives on land, we do hardly imagine how big and vast the oceans are. Imagine yourself sitting on a satellite way above the Pacific. And there's going to be a point where you hardly see any land. All you see is the ocean. And Moria sits more or less in the center of that vast ocean area, the Pacific. It's in fact one of the largest biomes on the earth. So if you are interested in understanding and predicting how the wonderful ecosystems in Moria will evolve in the future, what impact climate change will have on these ecosystems, how humans will impact that system, then it's important that we do not only consider the local processes, but consider that Moria sits inside this fantastically large biome, the Pacific ocean. In my presentation today, I would like to illustrate two reasons why we explicitly need to think about those connections between the large scale, the processes that occur on scales of hundreds or thousands of kilometers, and the local processes that we're ultimately interested in understanding in order to predict what happens to individual corals and individual ecosystems. The first example is unfolding as we speak. It's the 2015-2016 El Nino. It's well familiar to you because it brings the badly needed rainwater to you that you have been hoping for so for so many years. But the major changes El Nino causes occur in the Pacific Ocean. As you see in this animation, the temperature anomalies are primarily located near the equator. These are the warm and red colors you see evolving through time. And we see that a very large fraction of the tropical Pacific has temperature, which are in exceedance of two degrees. The reason for why we have these SST anomalies are because the ocean and the atmosphere interact with each other in that region. And so we have changes in trade winds. We have ocean dynamics. All of these processes together lead to these complex patterns of warming. But this warming has also impact on Maria and the coral reefs around it. When temperatures go above a certain threshold, then actually the Sontella D, algae that live inside the corals will actually leave the coral and the coral has no longer the food available that it needs to grow. It can survive this condition of bleaching as we call it for a while, but if the Sontella do not come back, the coral eventually dies. In this figure taken from the coral watch from the NOAA website shows the current level of threat in the Pacific Ocean. Wherever we see orange and red colors, we have high levels of alert, meaning there's a good chance that the coral reefs in this area will bleach in the coming weeks. Here's actually the forecast for April and May of this year, and we see that Maria actually will probably be exposed to higher levels of threat. We have heard the news about the coral bleaching in the Great Bear Reef of Australia. It's very likely that actually Maria Tahiti of French Polynesia will experience a similar event in the coming weeks. This is even more specifically depicted here in this detailed map, also from the NOAA website that shows the threat levels for April and May of this year. For an area around 100 by 100 kilometers around Maria. And we are in the orange to red colors, meaning there's a very high chance that the major bleaching event will occur. But it's not temperature change alone that we're worried about. It's also ocean acidification. As humans have added CO2 to the atmosphere, the CO2 does not only cause warming, but also ocean acidification. This is caused by the fact that the ocean takes up that CO2 from the atmosphere and that CO2 reacts with water liberating protons, i.e. we see a reduction in pH. Corals do not look like low pH waters. In these natural experiments by Fabrizios and colleagues from the Great Bear Reef, they have looked at places where conditions are naturally low in pH. On the left-hand side, you see an image that shows the corals in conditions of more or less today's ocean, pH around 8. In the center, you see another side where the pH is about 0.1 lower and you see already much less the abundance of corals less diversity. On the right-hand side, in conditions reflecting maybe at the end of the century, we no longer see any corals. So this drop in pH, particularly in the saturation state with regard to the mineral that they form, this calcium carbon mineral called aragonite, is very detrimental to the corals. So let's take a look at the global scale, what that means. These are model results from 1765 and they show the saturation state across the globe. Wherever we see red colors, these are conditions of high super-saturations, those are the conditions that corals like. And if you look at the black points where they are, these are indications where we find coral reefs today, they're all inside red and dark red colors, meaning these optimal conditions. Now as we move forward to 1995, we see that this area of super-saturation, of high super-saturation has shrunken, but still the majority of coral reefs are inside. Now fast forward to the future, 2014 and 2100, we see that that region of red colors disappear and we have bluish colors for most of the regions for coral reefs, which are sort of marginal conditions for corals. So we don't only have this threat of global warming, we also have this threat of ocean acidification. And both are processes that occur on large scales and global scales, but have impact locally on Moria. So how do we address this big challenge of scales? Our proposition is to use a sort of a novel telescopic grid configuration of a regional ocean modeling system that we have developed here at ETH, where we put Moria at the center. That allows us to model essentially the processes occurring around Moria with very, very high resolution. But at the same time, this model is embedded in the whole Pacific, allowing us to look at the connection between whole Pacific processes and the local processes around Moria. And I show you here an animation, a prototype animation of the sea surface temperature of this model. And as we zooming in, you see first the large scale details, the large scale temperature gradients between the poles and equator. But as we zoom in, we see more and more essentially fluctuations. These are turbulent structures that are so common in the ocean. But we also see how these create essentially highly variable environment that we need to take into consideration when addressing what's happening around Moria. This model contains not only physics, but also representations of the ecosystems and also representation of biogeochemistry so we can address not only the changes in physics but also the interaction with biology and biogeochemistry. So in conclusion, when we think about Moria, it's important that we do not just focus on the local processes but recognize that those local processes are influenced by large scale processes requiring us to think across scales. And we think we have the right tool available to address that connection between Pacific scale processes and local processes at Moria. I said I would like to thank you for your attention and also would like to hand over to Matt Munich who will be here to address any questions you might have. Thank you very much. So thanks to Nicky. So for my section I'm just going to follow up that Nicky presented there and Matt the large scale changes that are happening across the Pacific Ocean and indeed across the planet. So the title of my section of the presentation is really inspired by this committee report that the US National Science Foundation put together to look at the next 10 years of environmental research priorities. And in the context of all these global changes the report here so we obviously have to anticipate what the future is going to be like and yes we do need to adapt to it but can we go one step further and not only adapt but also try to change the socio-environmental trajectory so we can target and design resilience, well-being and prosperity into the future despite these changes and the same of which we can't reverse anytime soon. So that's really the emerging sort of new field of sustainability science which is inherently an interdisciplinary approach physical, biological and also social but it's also a systems approach and as Nicky mentioned the system in this case is the whole planet so we really need to look at these processes at the scale of the system which is the planet whether it's ocean acidification or the atmospheric impacts but of course that's affecting life and life is feeding back onto the planet too so we can't just look at the physical processes we have to look at how biology is behaving and particularly one species, humans and we're influenced by our environment but we also are very much influencing the environment but to understand that feedback particularly from the biology we need to understand things at the scale of a molecule genomes and molecular pathways ocean acidification for example we need to know the calcification process that goes on within corals what genomic variation there might be among species of corals in that process and even among individuals of the same species where there's variation and how will they cope and respond to lower pH so we absolutely have to work at the molecular level as well as going up to the systems level the planetary scale so it's an approach, a systems approach which is genome up and planet down so that's a complex problem to put it mildly planet is pretty big and if we have to integrate everything from these molecular processes up to the planetary processes it's overwhelming complexity that we're faced with and what we're trying to build is this avatar of the celestial representation of model of how the earth behaves so we can understand what's coming in the future and adapt and even design a better future now we've faced this sort of overwhelming complexity before we're currently still facing it when we try for example in biomedical research so in other aspects of science in biomedical research we're trying to understand the human organism which is probably one of the most complex things in the universe to do this in biomedical research we have a lot of simpler model organisms just a handful for example C. elegans here and nematode worm we still have to go from molecule and cell but we only have to go up to this little worm not all the way up to the complex human to understand a lot of the processes and how they function and medicine has benefited a lot from this research already but in the context of sustainability our model systems they're not going to be model organisms they're going to be model ecosystems and so our approach is really instead of going up to the molecule but instead of going up to the whole planet we can go up to something a lot simpler like a small island and the small island just as Drosophila Melanogaster the fruit fly is a model organism for genomics for ecology the small islands are our model ecosystems so actually what we want to study about those model ecosystems this was phrased most eloquently by Paul Gauguin he's very influenced by the islands of Polynesia so basically we want to see where did the island come from how did the system get to be what it is today what is it today we have to understand what it is and how it functions at the moment and where is it heading what's the future going to be like so we know where we've come from we came from a natural earth where humans didn't exist and Darwin pointed that out to us Darwin also instantly strongly influenced the scientific islands in his thinking and where are we heading well we're heading if we're not there already to an anthropogenic earth or the Anthropocene an earth dominated by human activity so at the scale of the planet that's overwhelmingly complex as I said but our approach here is to go down to small islands and to study those small islands as microcosms model systems across this spectrum from natural to the most human dominated but at the scale of the most human dominated small islands like Singapore or Manhattan so our colleagues here at ETH Zurich have been really pioneering the way with their studies in Singapore an island very dominated by human activity and the sister institute to bids groups at NYU in New York are doing similar kinds of approaches to Manhattan so there's a lot we can learn from these studies on human dominated but what about the the natural end of the spectrum so if we're going to look for a place where humans are having somewhat minimum impact that's hard to find these days but the last place on earth that humans got to and started to impact are the Polynesian islands, the islands of eastern Polynesia which of course are influenced by humans today but still retain somewhat their natural systems so the island of Moria as Nicky pointed out is really in the center of the Pacific Ocean as this graphic thanks to Google Earth shows very clearly Moria is part of the French overseas country of French Polynesia which is a self governing overseas country of France it's a small country with 118 islands about 300,000 just under 300,000 people but it actually controls 5 million square kilometers of marine real estate so a big chunk of the earth is actually French Polynesia is the stewards of this of this large area so on Moria it's a rather exceptionally attractive island but it's also unusual in another way in that it hosts two international research stations so the French station here Creole which is part of the the French National Center for Scientific Research since 1971 and since 1985 Berkeley has had a lab there the Gump Research Station on land donated by Richard Gump to the University of California in the early 1980s so we collaborate and the foundation for a lot of the projects we're talking about today is really this collaboration between the two stations the French and the American stations on Moria and now an expanded collaboration with other institutions around the world and the joint efforts was this Moria Biocode project which was to sequence genetically sequence and image, digitally image every species of animal and plant and a lot of fungi on the island of Moria and that really was an attempt to put together the parts list what are the parts of this system so the first step towards taking this system's level approach just a couple words about the Gump Station in particular being as we're at Berkeley and I live there and work at this station so that is the Gump Station since Richard Gump donated the land most of the facilities there have been built thanks to the support of Gordon and Betty Moore and the family and the Mor foundation the research facilities there's residences for up to about 40 or 50 people and we have a cultural center which is very significant to run in partnership with a local community based organization Te Puatitia we also host the only National Science Foundation long-term ecological research site focused on coral reefs which is run out of UC Santa Barbara in collaboration with other UC campuses, the system-wide effort along with other institutions across the United States and this provides a really unparalleled data set and is in collaboration with the French efforts in France through the Creole Directs the French National Center of Excellence for coral reef research so Morere is self-set in a little archipelago cluster of islands here with the big island of Tahiti the capital next door and up to the north there are a small privately owned Atoll, Teterua which Marlon Brando bought and the Brando estate now owns and manages and so we have these scales of complexity from a very simple private low Atoll island up to the big island of Tahiti with nearly 200,000 people and Morere is sort of the Goldilocks island in between just about not too big not too small for our studies 17,000 people but Teterua we have a new collaboration with Teterua and thanks to the support of the really innovative hotel luxury hotel but one that's close to net zero carbon the Brando we have a small field station out there so we can actually start studying this simple island of Teterua and then advance quickly on perhaps scaling up to Morere and eventually to larger places like Tahiti so in Mathias Troyer, Professor Mathias Troyer computational physics from from ETH Zurich the next stage in the story has been organizing a conference on computational quantum computing at the Gump station for a number of years and in discussions we came up with this idea of can we model something as complex as Morere and how would we go about doing that so the first workshop was hosted at ETH Zurich in late 2013 we developed this approach with a number of other institutions over a series of conferences over the next coming year we came up with this vision which was covered in nature and now we have over 20 institutional partners over 80 scientists involved and recently just published a slight more detailed roadmap of how we're going about this and it basically involves a lot of data science so it's very appropriate that we're here at BIDS but also physical modeling, the biological the social and ecological and then bringing it all together at the end in these simulations which are use-oriented simulations that aiming so hence services is very important they want to support for example scenarios based planning and I come back at the end here to the conclusion of that NSF panel is we need to improve the capacity to forecast complex environmental trajectories so we need these complex simulations everything that they involve so today we'll hear about a couple of examples simulating the future of the coral reef simulating the future of mosquito-borne infectious disease and I'm just going to finish with saying that the goal of this is to enable local communities everywhere but in this case our trial system is Morere to design resilient systems and designing what you want the future to be is for the local community to decide so it absolutely has to involve local communities we have a very powerful collaboration with the Tahitian community on Morere and indeed their full partners of this project because Tahitian culture is very rich it had a lot of traditional knowledge about the ecosystems and how they function it's threatened that knowledge is disappearing it's eroding and so the community is digitizing its knowledge to try to save it and keep it and so this platform is really important to ethno-code how do we code that traditional knowledge into the new digital platform so it can be passed on to future generations of Tahitians and incorporated into the broader effort so I'm going to finish there and hand it over to Matias Troyer who I just more or less introduced to you Matias thank you so what we need is the core of the effort is we need to have all of the data we have the information we need to build up a digital representation of the ecosystem the island containing the whole system that's a big challenge we have to start somewhere and here's the first picture of the first time we showed it at the EDH in Zurich and I'll show a better version today but first I want to show you how to build it and what it should be it should be a digital space and time representation of the data we have the current state, the past state and it should be a platform to allow us to simulate the whole system post-dict, validate and then predict the future for that we need to first get the island digitized in the past we did it manually with soundings with surveying, it took a long time nowadays we can do it much better using satellites airplanes, boats drones, divers and more so the first step was we needed to get the land modeled for that we tasked the satellite to take pictures and it simply flies over once a week and then it takes two pictures and from those two pictures like with the eyes one gets a stereo image and can build up a 3D model of the land the resolution when you zoom in goes down to every single tree and you can measure the height and size of the trees or the buildings of everything then we need the water the water flows around the coral the lagoon and that is done at first persona and there was the US funded cruise there with big vessel and the small one that got the depth of the ocean around it which is really important as the input for the simulations that were shown by Nicky Gruber but those boats can only go where it's not too shallow and most of the lagoon is very shallow two meters or less with coral sticking out and for that you can fly airplanes over it with the laser the scanner and scan the water down to negative 20 meters where the French had planned to scan those regions and a little corner here with the airport only the US National National Science Foundation you're pitched in money very quickly to cover the whole lagoon so that data exists now that's really important so now we really have the water depth all around here but then we want to go to smaller scales we want to go down to scales of the coral we want to see how it changes over time and that we also do by flyovers but we do it by us simply going there with cameras flying over it the camera that should actually move I don't know why it's not moving and swimming over that we made a 3D model here that we can then see the change from year to year if we go there once again so we have lots of data there are many groups there from Berkeley from ETH and many other places French Polynesia from France US and Europe and they have lots of data and there we come to a big data problem the big data problem is not that there's too much data around the problem is to find it we have to go to the web page for example of the gump station of Berkeley the bio code web page the the LTE the R page the Creope page of the French you have to find the data there to look what's around you have to read books about the social aspects the history you have to talk to many many people and that is hard so we want to make it easier by having in the first step the avatar be a representation of all the data that exists that you go there you can simply look at it in space and time or topic and just find the data that's there and then based on that build up the models that predict the future and so I want to now show you what it looks like on Maria here here's the view from the top this is the model you see the land you see the ocean we can go there and we can fly in let's see I can just fly in down into the bay over the Berkeley Gum Station you can look out over the ocean to the at all of the the background it's flashing up there but we want to now actually turn back turn around and look at Maria not just look at the model in 3D or zoom in but you want to see what is data that exists and we can for example the coral classification from the the the light picture and the the Anton Coller has identified what is coral what is seaweed what is sand so we see here the habitats and then if we take a picture once a year we get the change we also have all the data on land vegetation classification we have lots there that one can see again from satellite images from the color the spectral information the texture you find the land cover and again can see the change in the future due to climate change we also have then all the data sources that were mentioned from the bio code the sampling sites can go in there and find find the new species that we found there and they link directly to the database and shows in this case an insect or we also have all the data from the the LT E R sites these are shown here in green you can go there and have the data the water temperature fish count and so on you find the data by topic, by space, by time and again click then we go to that page and that's where we want to integrate the data that exists and just by starting to integrate it we build networks we build new science just by thinking about doing it and so while we build this up it already works much more than we thought and I want to pass on to the use of the data the use of the avatar in the next talk by Sally Holbrook from UCSB the problem is currently on sabbatical with Microsoft but that doesn't mean that the powerpoint works better I still didn't manage to have them with that oh good, okay, thanks thanks Neil okay so I want to tell you a little bit about one of the major occupants of coral reefs which is the coral itself and just like all ecosystems coral reefs are constantly disturbed by a lot of different factors and we know from decades of experience that coral reefs experience cyclones and big storm waves they can be bleached as you heard from Nikki's talk a few minutes ago and that bleaching can lead to death and they can also be attacked during outbreaks of these big predatory sea stars which we'll as you'll see in a minute mow down a coral reef in a matter of a year or two so typically in previous decades we have thought that coral reefs could be fully replete with coral, undergo one or more of these disturbances and lose a lot of coral over the landscape scale and then within a decade or so recover that coral much like a forest regenerates after a forest fire but in the last 20, 30 years or so scientists are increasingly recognizing that a lot of coral reefs that we study don't undergo these recoveries to coral Can people hear? Yeah, no? Did it get turned off? Maybe. So we are increasingly seeing corals that get damaged and disappear during disturbances and those reefs transition to seaweed beds rather than back to areas of live coral and you probably have read about this or heard about this phenomenon for the Caribbean where this is a pretty common experience and has been for the last 20, 25 years. So we think one of the reasons why we are seeing these transitions to seaweeds rather than back to coral is that coral reefs recently are undergoing a lot of increased stress and there's a couple different scales at which stresses occur for coral reefs. Some of them are more local like fishing pressure on important species of fish that will eat algae and keep it off of reefs and the introduction of pollutants, nutrients, sediments and stuff like that from the nearby land. These obviously are really local stressors and they are being combined increasingly with the more global stressors that Nikki talked about the warming of the ocean and ocean acidification. Now local stressors we can actually do something about you can control fishing for example you can modify land use and make things better for coral reefs that are adjacent to land and those kinds of efforts that can reduce the local stresses on coral reefs can help them stay resilient that is return back to the coral state when they get disturbed in the face of these longer term global stressors that are much harder for us to do anything about obviously on local time and spatial scales but in order to really be proactive about this and plan better management strategies we need a much better understanding of social ecological systems in tropical areas to make management plans that will help reefs stay resilient and also continue for us to reap the benefits that coral reefs provide. Now people have already been talking about why Mariah is a good study system for us clearly from the point of view of understanding the reefs themselves Mariah is a great place it's among the best studied set of coral reefs in the world the coral reefs as you're going to see in a second around Mariah vary a lot in their resilience that is in their reaction and recovery to disturbance and as Neil said Mariah has just about the right amount of complexity to make it challenging and interesting for us to model but doable. Now I'll tell you in the next couple slides some of what we do know about resilience in Mariah and the first set of information concerns the four reef which is the deeper sloping area outside the barrier reef crest and we know from several decades of work by the French and ourselves that the four reef undergoes disturbances and seems to be able to recover to coral dominance and it's done that at least three times since the 1970's and I'll show you a little bit of data here about the last 10 years on our four reef in Mariah and this is a picture from 10 years ago 2006 at this site right up here on the northern part of the island near the gum station and you can see at that time there was a ton of coral there the percent cover was about 50% which is a full cover of coral the way we measure it but in the several years after 2006 we had a big outbreak of this coral predator the crown of thorns and a cyclone in 2010 and the amount of coral on the four reef fell to basically zero as you can see in the photo and on the graph so we basically lost all the coral over a landscape scale on the four reef around pretty much the whole island during that recent set of disturbances but if you could look at what's happened in the last several years here's that site in 2014 and here it is last August in 2015 and you can see that it's recovered very quickly that coral cover this is a really resilient four reef on Mariah and it's one reason why it's been a huge interest to scientists to study it and resource managers because if we can understand why a reef is resilient we can make management plans to enhance resilience of other reefs that aren't so resilient so we know two big reasons why the four reef on Mariah is resilient and one of them is that herbivorous fish like you see here suppressed the growth of seaweeds on the reef so they were able to get out onto the four reef and keep the reef clean so that coral could at least potentially grow back and they could do that because right now in Mariah they're not overfished so there's plenty of them and their nursery habitat where their babies live for about the first year of their life which is really close to shore is pretty intact around Mariah now the second reason we got that really fast recovery is that there was a huge colonization of sea of young corals like you see here and these young corals came from sources of parents probably from inside the lagoons and so we had a big recolonization of corals because we had parent corals nearby that were healthy and able to reproduce and these young were able to get back out and settle colonize out here on the four reef so there was good connectivity from where the parents were remaining and where the juveniles ended up to establish and grow now that's pretty interesting and what's even more interesting is that in Mariah the lagoons are actually not as affected by these big disturbances that are dramatic like cyclones and crown of thorn sea stars but they're more affected by human activities which are often harder for us to study and understand actually and we're noticing that the lagoons in Mariah are less resilient than the four reef and we're currently engaged in a lot of studies trying to understand why that's so so I'll just show you a last bit of data that I'll show you in my talk one thing we've noticed in this 10 year period that we just looked at for the four reef is that in some areas of the lagoon coral was there in 2006 and the cover of coral in those places has stayed about the same it stayed steady over that time period in other places in the lagoon they started with a lot of coral and this cover has declined and there's been replacement by seaweeds and so we're seeing areas in the lagoon then that are transitioning to this seaweed dominated state rather than the coral dominated state and the big question is why are some parts of the lagoon in Mariah like this right now in 2015 going into 16 why are other areas like that and of course the two things that we think are probably the most important in these differences in different parts of the lagoon have to do with fishing pressure on some of the key herbivorous fish like these species here that will eat algae and that will also help algae prevent it from getting established on the reef and then the second area of concern obviously relates to land use practices not just agriculture and the input of sediment and nutrients from fertilizers and things like that maybe pesticides and things but also other kinds of coastal development that result in things coming into the lagoon or disrupt lagoon habitats in other ways so in order to really understand why the dynamics on the four reef and the lagoon in Mariah are so different and also to be able to project forward into the future we need whole island simulation models like the avatar and we want to be able to capture the links and the feedbacks between the physical environment things Nikki Gruber was talking about and the biological environment and human activities now this slide just reminds us that some of the data sources that Mateus mentioned to you a couple minutes ago come from different kinds of studies that we do in the lagoon and on the four reef and they range from long term measurements so we get time series of lots of different biological and physical variables people do short term process studies in the field and in the lab there are different kinds of experiments that are done in the field and in mesocosms and in the lab and there's modeling and integration and through all of those things we get component data for the avatar but we also can build smaller models which can then be combined eventually and integrated to form the avatar itself so as Neil said our ultimate aim is simulation synthesis and service we really want to be able to forecast what's coming in the future and be able to do scenario modeling to understand what's coming and also help managers figure out the best ways forward in terms of management practices for both the terrestrial and the marine environment in Morea and I will stop there and hand it over Thank you Neil In choosing terrestrial system to talk about we've chosen one of the avatar projects concerning mosquitoes and especially the occurrence of an outbreak of Zika which you've no doubt heard about which actually happened in French Polynesia in 2013 Islands you think of also as separated isolated habitats but in fact they're very connected and French Polynesia shown here in the circles the white circle here is connected and very connected both by roads shipping routes air networks and on the island of course we have roads recently Morea has been connected by a submarine cable that will bring high-speed data to Morea and thanks to Larry Conrad and others at Berkeley and at UC and the University of Hawaii this cable is about to be connected which will transform how we can deliver research but also education these connections are not new of course the rate at which we're communicating and moving things around the world is escalating but we've had connections and people have been connected to these islands for 1500 years which has been the research of one of our collaborators Patrick Kirch from Berkeley and that's shown in the lower left the project I want to talk about is directed by Hervé Bosson who is the project leader of a government institution ILM charged with health and understanding disease in French Polynesia there are two main vectors mosquito vectors of disease in French Polynesia the one on the right is Aedes Polynesiensis which certainly was transported by the Polynesians potentially a native species but most likely introduced by the Polynesians it tends to be in more natural habitats the one on the left is Aedes Egypti that certainly came with people probably the Europeans and this is the main vector of the diseases Dengue and Zika and others that we're most interested in because it tends to be in urban settings the Zika outbreak in French Polynesia in 2013 was actually part of a global outbreak that has started in the 1940s and 1950s shown there on the upper right in Africa moving across Africa in the 1960s then to India in the 1970s and then reappearing in the island of Yap in 2007 before coming to French Polynesia in 2013 and of course more recently it has spread through South America and now is appearing in other places because of people traveling the graph on the bottom just shows this outbreak which is sort of a classical invasive species outbreak from October 2013 through January, February and March the reported cases are in blue and estimated cases here in orange that 60 or 70% of the people were probably infected based on blood samples and other information and this has become a case study now that is appearing in places like the Lancet and elsewhere we have now genetic tools to get rid of mosquitoes we now could get rid of all the mosquitoes of a particular species some of these tools were developed here at Berkeley, Christopher Cass 9 for example and also tools that are simpler also genetic and one is shown here where there is a bacterium that is associated with arthropods especially mosquitoes and by manipulating this bacterium and introducing males that are sterile because of this bacterium one can suppress the population of a mosquito population in nature and this is interesting and much literature recently and discussion has centered around well should we do this should we get rid of a mosquito species and what are the implications for the ecological community but also the people that live there as you know mosquitoes are one of the most dangerous organisms on earth just because of the numbers of people that die as a result of interacting with mosquitoes well the island avatar is extremely well positioned for this sort of research there are a couple things that jump out from this figure that Neal showed earlier first of all we have this scale of complexity so if we can do a smaller study on one of these islands and it works we can scale up to first of all Marea and then Tahiti and then the other thing to point out is this study will take that I'll talk about took place on this atoll of Tetiaroa in association with the Tetiaroa Society and this atoll itself is a set of smaller islands which from a research perspective is great because you can do manipulations on one island and compare it to an island that you have not manipulated so in this study first of all the mosquitoes were removed from the control island here mosquitoes are often found in water habitats that accumulate associated with human dwellings surveillance effort was started on the island of Tahiti was the production and then eventually the release of these incompatible sterile males and then this project monitored the impact on the mosquito population and I'll show you those results next so here is the atoll of Tetiaroa and as I said it itself comprises several little islands and what the researchers chose to do was to designate one island as the treatment where these sterile males would be introduced that's an orange and the blue island there was left as a control and here are the results from September 2014 so in the treatment it's this orange line shows that there were actually more mosquitoes in the treatment setting than the control and then over time you can see with the introduction of these sterile males the treatment island decreased in numbers of mosquitoes compared to the control so this is a really nice example of suppressing mosquito populations using these approaches next steps in this project is an effort that a group of researchers who met in February at the gum station to discuss this project have called MAZI SIM and what it is is that simulation using aspects of this avatar project including data science, physical modeling of the terrestrial but also marine habitats using what we know about genetic systems to construct bacterial systems and a genetic background so that these studies can be done at a larger scale understanding what this means to the economies and the social structure in French Polynesia and then making predictions for the future so one goal of this project is to scale up from Tetyaroa to the island of Marea and eventually Tahiti but also at the same time to understand the actual impact of people's lives for the good of the entire community so I'll stop there and hand it over to our next speaker Russ Schmidt from UC Santa Barbara Alright, thanks very much I've been tasked with just giving some summary concluding remarks and then opening up for questions that you may have and I want to start by sort of coming full circle to what we're trying to do here by integrating this social ecological system using Marea as our model system and I think the best example is to sort of go back to these three talks that you heard Nikki Brueber really cogently argued for why we need to sort of consider even while we're looking at an island system that it's embedded in a global environment which influences it drives a lot of the reaction that's going to happen locally through changes in the ocean and changes in the atmosphere and so we have to capture that external drivers into systems how they affect the reef things like ocean temperature change ocean acidification we know we have to capture those correctly and model them correctly similarly for the terrestrial side we know things like changing climate's going to influence the spread of diseases and those sorts of things which we have to take into account so these are not surprising sorts of interactions that we have to do within these talks given by Sally and George we also need to understand the sort of internal dynamics of having them there but I want to talk about what the power of is doing this together as a group where we actually are coupling the social with the ecologicalness for a whole systems approach and so while these connections aren't very surprising to any of us what's emerging are surprising connections that we hadn't thought of and you probably thought I hope these were two very interesting talks about reef resilience and about control of mosquito to control infectious diseases but in fact what's emerging is potentially surprising connection between these two different studies in fact what we are beginning to see evidence of is that in fact mosquitoes may be influencing resilience of corals this is an area we are going to be exploring right how is that possible it's possible because of how these insect born infectious diseases alters human behavior how does it happen in Mariah in Mariah when sicknesses occur the Zika outbreaks we see a spike in fishing why is that it's because traditionally when an unexpected expense occurs like the need to buy medicines the way traditional families get that resources is to actually fish and sell the products so what we are seeing is a relationship between variation and fishing in the Likun and outbreaks of the Zika this kind of connection is only possible when we all get together and begin to see these connections so this I think is an illustration of what's very exciting about this program so what I want to do then is end this by thinking of all for being here and for being engaged and we invite you to stay engaged and I'd like you to open it up now for any questions you may have so the speakers are going to come forward I hope so you can direct if they are still intact thank you great talks I have two questions actually one is in terms of the data that goes into the model eventually have you ever considered using also citizen scientists and people collecting data when I saw the picture in Matthias talks I think the diver I mean you have a lot of divers in the water they can collect whatever and the other is how much local ecological knowledge is in the data that's a great source of information too and especially when it comes to stuff like you mentioned in the end of fishing that's right I'm going to give you this to Neil to answer but I just want to say that there is a lot of traditional knowledge and the Atatia center is one of the mechanisms that we've used for a scientist to communicate with elders to actually impart information back and forth and it's really clear that we've learned from each other by doing that process yeah I mean to follow up and we don't have time obviously today to go into this in detail but it's a huge and exciting I think component how do you involve the local population so citizen science which in this case does involve a lot of rich traditional knowledge because of the nature of where it is but wherever this takes place we have tools now that people can observe your personal health with your cell phone your personal health depends on the environment you're exposed to so also we can use a lot of those new sensor type devices to collect and gather data that can be then integrated into the avatar so the avatar is an open science platform and not just for scientists it's an open platform for the whole community in this case this community happens to have a lot of scientists in it but in theory it's usable anywhere else so if people are gathering data posting it on the avatar what kinds of how do those data get evaluated if they need to be evaluated how are they discoverable and linked potentially into scientific research programs but also used for other purposes so as I mentioned the local community that's a tier group coding their traditional knowledge for that specific purpose that they were doing anyway they can post it into the avatar platform they may or may not choose to open that up some of those data might be sensitive they publish in a way publishing the data so any citizen any person could do that and they can decide how if they want to share it our scientific goal is to make it all open but even in that case some for example distributions of some endangered species you don't want to necessarily make completely open to everyone so these are the issues privacy where we do actually legitimately want some distributions on the data that project like this can grapple with the governments, the citizens and as well as Dick. Thank you I'm interested in the fact that the Zika virus in Brazil is the front page of the New York Times we read about it it's the apocalypse now horrific stories about abnormal births that are occurring women shouldn't get pregnant here 65 to 70% of the people in French Polynesia were infected with the Zika virus in 2012 and also front page of the New York Times Obama calling for $2 billion to be allocated to Zika research and I'm just wondering what I'm missing were there what were the consequences of the infection rate in Maria in 20 formities how and then also on your project how do you access some of that $2 billion by leveraging what you've done well we could sure use that $2 billion I would solve all the health yeah that aside that Lancet paper is probably the most recent up to date assessment of the other effects associated with this outbreak and I think there were eight cases of microcephaly that occurred during that time and one other that occurred at sort of before and after so this study suggests that it's not conclusive but it's certainly consistent with the time of pregnancy that the outbreak occurred and these cases so that the numbers maybe don't sorry the numbers don't there's not a strong association but certainly it's very consistent with the timing of this outbreak so in terms of what the people have experienced I mean otherwise this is quite a mild virus I mean it's not like measles and probably most people didn't realize that they had it you know I don't think at the time researchers were thinking that this was leading to something bigger and maybe that's partly why it didn't receive the attention at the time that it probably should have certainly now I think the research community is going back to these previous outbreaks and analyzing them in great detail and it's really gratifying to see that the research in French Polynesia is getting its you know the recognition that it deserves do you want to add anything? one thing on that it was actually it was identified as Zika very quickly in French Polynesia I mean it's not like we didn't know it was Zika and we've just found out now that that was Zika thanks to the CDC or someone the ILM the local biomedical research institute identified that virus very fast and it was received international among scientists recognition that wow that's really impressive they identified it because a lot of the symptoms look like dengue and no one bothers to study it in any more depth but because we have this biomedical research institute on Tahiti they identified it no this is unusual virus it's not dengue the birth problems weren't so obvious then but there were other syndromes that partial paralysis so a lot of adults a number of adults were hospitalized with very severe paralysis syndromes which cost the local health authority a fortune so there were some severe impacts but as George said most people it's very mild fever I may have got it I don't know 20% yeah I wasn't pregnant at the time but so yeah but these are the things Zika, chikungunya unfortunately there are waves of these epidemics that come through what the next one will be some other name will no doubt be hitting the headlines in the next few years this is the globalized world especially a warming globalized world where these mosquitoes are becoming more and more of a problem that they carry so that's why we need this it's exciting to have these technologies where we can potentially take out these vectors but we do need to know what are the consequences of removing species selectively surgically removing species from an ecosystem that's a brand new power George and I and others we've been working for a long time on trying to get rid of various insects it's really really hard we actually have another experiment we did very successfully in French Malaysia but this new power is to design ecosystems literally we talk about gene editing this is species editing of a system but what consequences to that power we need to know what the system how that functions if we're going to species edit and make mistakes I wondered if you could say a few words about the avatar dimension of this project which I find an incredibly exciting project one is what is the official language or is there not an official language are there three languages at least or are there more than three languages and how do you deal with multi-linguality on the in the avatar itself secondly you're essentially constructing a virtual identity for Mariah which has no geographical location and so what is the boundary the social, cultural boundary that the avatar begins and ends or is there not such a boundary and thirdly what is the governance structure of the avatar I think you're a little cute about the identification of French Polynesia as a self-governing country I think was the term that was used there is some history here as you probably know and particularly from Mariah and then within Polynesia there is some history over this issue so I'm not sure as scientists you're sort of dancing around this issue delicately or if this is actually an explicit understanding I'd be very interested to know thank you okay so first of all the question of languages it's not just the question of languages it's also a question of cultures of world views and then within a language is also that the sociologists speak a different language than the biologists, the physicists the geographers so one big challenge is indeed getting representation that is abstracted from the language and that integrates languages that the groups use it's not just French and English it's English and English and that's where most of the data science efforts go but even more importantly people view the world differently be it the native Tahitians or the western scientists and there we explore about how do they view the world how would they sort the data categorize it for example they identify waves not by the wave height or direction but by the sound they make and certain sounds means there's a storm coming certain sounds mean they should go fish out there for example so it is a very different few of the world that one learns by looking at that exact question and that's one of the things we explore here about the boundaries we've heard from Nicky Gruber at some point we need the whole earth Pacific ocean basin the islands around that depends on the question you ask our core focus is for some questions you need to go begin in scale we want to focus on the small scale first to build up the tools the methods that you can and then use in many places around the world and that's why we start from a small island Teturoa Moreaia and then we slowly expand it about the governance yeah I pass on to Neil who has thought lots about that yeah I know I was going to get that one thanks I just want to say on the world view I think that is really important and it's very sociologist or geneticist so I'm not speaking of this for many qualifications but Hinano Tebaimofi who leads the traditional knowledge aspect leads the traditional knowledge aspect of the project told me that Tahitians go into the future looking backwards which is interesting what does that mean it's a different way of looking at the world they view the world in a very holistic way and in our discussions we've had a lot of problems in trying to communicate about the island and looking at fish as separate from humans, separate from plants so I know everything is connected and the way they think about it the way they communicate about it is very holistic which is where science is moving back to if you like so they may have things that can teach us but looking back as they go forward the future is also I think partly because the traditional knowledge was the survival kit and it's passed down from generation to generation orally there was no writing so it was very very valuable and they learned how to survive on these islands so instead maybe looking to the future trying to figure it out yourself the most important thing was to get all the knowledge from your ancestors hence a little bit looking back bringing that survival kit with you so I don't know but these are really interesting interfaces between different cultures that can be explored in terms of the current political situation I don't know if I was being cute saying that but it is an overseas country of France that's the official designation or collectivity of France overseas there's obviously a complex history like many places in the world and how the avatar works within that social political context is these are really great questions and we don't have all of the answers this is an invitation that's the purpose of this meeting is to invite people who are interested who have questions, who have expertise to join the project thank you Hi, so I was wondering so one of the ultimate goals of this initiative is to create policy for restoration sort of different processes to really help these ecosystems and I was wondering what the criteria is to decide what kind of decisions should be made in terms of like for what side I was pressing on with the coral reefs I know it was these coral reefs I think it's probably an alternative stable state that they were turning into with the macroalgae and so I was wondering does that have a similar impact as like algae has with sutrification or is like how is the decision made what type of ecosystems you want to see in the area or if there's some sort of co-existence that you're trying to build with different ecosystems well that is a great question because coral reefs provide a ton of different ecosystem services to society and of course they range from economic services like fishing ecotourism and things like that all the way to cultural services you know ceremonial and cultural identity types of services and there's a ton of other stuff in between that and so one of the big challenges I think for the avatar project is to be able to scenario model in the context of what the local community on any of our islands but more as our first island maybe agrees are their goals whether you want a reef that's covered with coral covered with algae or has a mixture of algae and coral really depends on a lot of factors because there's value potentially in different ecosystem states it's just like do we want a forest or a farmland and so on and so forth and I think that one of the things that motivates us to get the community on Marea really involved in this project is because we recognize that that kind of scenario building is not just a scientific endeavor it's a political, cultural, economic and social endeavor and so it's a very complicated question but again I think Marea is just complicated enough politically, socially economically that we can maybe work with the community and they can work with us when we go forward thinking about desired outcomes I may be wrong about that but that's our hope yeah I can mention that one of the early strategies for building the avatar and implementing it is to explore consequences of sea level rise because that's something we know is coming and we have some estimates of how rapidly it might occur and some of the outcomes of sea level rise are at least recognized or the potential outcomes and so that affords an opportunity to look at the consequences of sea level rise not just to the reef ecosystem but to the land ecosystem to places where people live which is very low close to the water and to the and effects of terrestrial activities on that whole sea level rise scenario and consequences and so that's an example of one of our defined kind of early avatar scenario building efforts that we might try to do so to answer that I think what we've assembled I think is we are really poised to do not just incremental but sort of a real transformational project here right and we have all the pieces assembled yet there are things that we still need to get done and I think Mateus and several of us have been talking about what's the priority for what we need to do now there's clearly lots of data science sort of things to do this the modeling things that we need to do the platform building kinds of things to do those are the things that we need to sort of move forward on I think we have the right scientists we have the right social scientists we have the right sort of combination of what we need to do is make sure whatever we do it's scalable so it's not about more it's about how you take what we do here and transfer across other systems and so that we can scale up to that so to make progress I think we need to be able to move to the next step and that's you know what we're struggling to do do you want to add anything so one of the things we've seen is the value that comes from interacting across campuses in the UC system for example but also among major universities and these are problems that really know one university or research group can tackle by ourselves and so I think this is also a model for how we can address some really grand challenges in a transformational way what is the or how is this project backed by the by the local government not necessarily the local authorities I should say because you're quickly coming up and already showed some data and you could say well we need eventually the impact in terms of conversation conservation so for example protecting certain reef areas or on land how is this how is this backed by the government and by the local authorities will they listen to you or because typically lots of experiences in Fiji and it's not it's more easy to come up with data that show that there is a need for conservation than implementing conservation measures in the end so that's another great question that we could spend easily an hour a long time talking about but to try to give a short answer number one it's not just the government or even mainly the government that is important in making these management plans happen one of the things we're very much trying to do is facilitate at least bottom up community level engagement in understanding what the future might look like informed being able to make informed decisions as individual citizens whether that then needs to be that knowledge and understanding and if there is any shared vision of the future and how to achieve it I think one of the powerful things with the avatars potentially being able to visualize it, what if we did this and then you run through oh it looks like that this wasn't quite what I was wanting or there was some unexpected impact on some other part of the system that would affect somebody else but whether the community then of course that's a loaded term as well I realize I'm treading over a lot of very sensitive terms but the application of any common project or implementation management could be done by the community itself doesn't necessarily need to then be regulated into government laws or it can of course inform government processes so in some of the work we've been doing already including with the Teturoa Society on a sustainable and conservation and sustainable use plan for example community driven the commune the local the municipality government takes the results of that and says hey this is really interesting because we're in the process of doing our zoning regulation in French the Pégeard a regulation that and this kind of information is very useful for us we can translate that into regulations if that's what the community is telling us so and above that you have the local government of French Malaysia who also are responsible and then the government in Paris so there's many layers of government as there are in most places right in California County, State, Federal Switzerland of course very complex too so how this translates up from an empowered informed local citizenry through what political instruments are to be defined but that's so the French Polynesian government the municipality governments the local community are very open I would say and actively engaged in this effort so I wanted to ask a question about the long term sustainability of the data in the model what do you guys envision as the set of individuals or institutions who will help to curate the data in the model and what sort of role do you see for museums and libraries and universities in terms of what they ought to do and how they ought to change to make something like this last for the long term so for the data there are already the long term projects in place like the LTE the our sites the long term funding supported the the biocode data the the specimens are in museums already now they are curated there but there's really a demand for the long term curation of the data from the papers from Gaetz, from the research and we envision the avatar to be a place where you can publish the data where it can be archived where it can be accessed, referenced cited afterwards and that's the infrastructure that we want to build up here a way to publish and archive all of this data and models and keep it around long term that's one of the goals we have and that has to be built up and then one has to see where the funding comes from the support infrastructure welcome now so the multi multi scale multi data source integration aspect for modeling is one of the most fascinating and unique parts of this project but at the same time I'm curious what your strategy for model validation and verification is going to be because you're really treading into waters that are fully uncharted from the perspective of not having analytical answers or anything to validate against the whole point of this is to actually do as you've said decision making and scenario based modeling for decision making so what is the strategy for validation verification and building trust on these very complex new kinds of modeling yeah yeah okay so we have one example where we want to start with that and those are the water flows because they are the basis for most of the modeling if we don't get the water flows right then how should we have the transport of nutrients and flower and so on right so that's one of the first challenges that means coupling math simulations of the ocean scale currents to the local currents around the coral hats and that is what we focus on one of the first modeling modeling challenges and that's what we want to try to the pilot project in the next years and it has to be validated against field measurements sensors in the fields for water flows and so on and it has to be made to work and be checked out there and then one can go to smaller scales the water flows around the coral hats inside the coral and one can go to the bigger scales then one the couples in the weather the microclimate, the rainfall patterns turns out to change then we add the runoff we need stream gauges and instruments there so we need to always validate against field measurements and data and build it up step by step we have people working on all those little pieces the challenge now is to combine it and validate it so we have maybe time for one last question we'll have two last questions where do you envision it coming from near to the medium term future I think from the vice chancellor for research office we have a great thing at the ETH that every professor gets the base funding that's guaranteed and fixed and with that we should go out and try out new things long term things visionary things so one big advantage I have at the ETH is that that is funded supported to bring it to the point where then we can look for funding elsewhere but the seed funding is really important for that and we had that thanks to Berkeley and thanks to ETH so at this meeting and Neil also knows this field we have population genetic models we have ecological models the Tete Heroa study I described at least what I described today was really just a manipulation but for the island of Morea and then parts of Tahiti especially the built environment there are collaborators who have done similar things in other environments I believe in Australia and Indonesia where they model the success or suppression of insects following these kinds of manipulations I can talk to you about it later if you like and one thing we want to look into here is really that you need to model how the mosquito spreads how it drifts in the wind, how it flies around and when you see that there's a road there's a big block because it does not get far, there's a wall somewhere then it's a block, when there's a pond somewhere it spreads so you really need to model it at the scale that we saw at the one foot or two feet scale and then put in the models at vacuum diffusion models of how the mosquitoes live and fly around there we had a proposal for that submitted to the French funding agencies, they rejected it in the fall because working on the mosquito vector suppression, things like Zika was not of any public interest last false that's how things changed so we have a project that we just need to fund it again did you want to call one? so that's a really interesting question and I think at the heart of much of the public discussion centered on well what happens if we get rid of a species and in French Polynesia as Neil pointed out we have had projects involved in biological control where an organism was introduced to control another and historically some of these did not end well and in recent times there's an expectation of risk assessment that involves pre-release studies very detailed biological studies and so on and I think in thinking about getting rid of a mosquito there are potentially great consequences will it be replaced by something else does it fill a niche in the community that's absolutely essential and so on these aren't things that you could necessarily figure out without doing some kind of manipulation on a small scale before you scale up to a larger environment thanks very much we're going to have to end it there I want to take this opportunity to thank you all once again for not only coming and participating asking for the very difficult challenge that lay ahead for us but also we invite you to stay engaged in this process this really is a community project and I hope you captured some of the excitement that we have about this project as well so thank you very much you guys and thank you to you as well