Abstract

Marine life supports many ecosystem services including food and nutrition, natural products, and biodiversity critical for human livelihoods (Estes et al., 2021). Managing these marine resources, evaluating conservation programs, and enabling sustainable coastal and ocean development requires information about marine life. Standardized information is needed for national and regional assessments, to meet ambitious UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and targets of the Convention on Biological Diversity, inform the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and to make significant new scientific advances to understand life and how it changes. An important goal is to model and forecast marine life in order to evaluate scenarios of ocean uses, management options, and potential impacts of climate change on marine biodiversity in all its dimensions. Yet, at present, management of marine living resources often relies on proxy variables like temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, and topography, often without observations of the type and abundance of organisms. Great swaths of the ocean remain unstudied for marine life (Satterthwaite et al., 2021). We need to fill these gaps strategically if we want to follow the model of meteorology and weather services around the world which provide routine and reliable forecasts on which we all depend for daily activities.

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