Information
- Type
- Project
- Name
- Genomic Observatories under European Projects EMO BON and ARMS-MBON
- Description @en
- The European Marine Omics Biodiversity Observation Network (EMO BON) is a European initiative from the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC) to establish a coordinated, long-term biodiversity observatory. Currently there are many ongoing genomic observation stations in Europe. The goal for EMO BON is to support the individual marine biodiversity observatories within EMBRC and connect them under one centrally coordinated network, with shared protocols, data, and metadata standards. EMBRC provides the context and opportunity for partner institutions to participate and complement EMO BON by initiating biodiversity observation stations. EMO BON includes marine stations from Polar regions to the Red Sea that will sample for genomic marine biodiversity at frequent intervals. This network will contribute to the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and aims to be an important European component to the global ocean observation networks.
Collection of marine water, sediment and organisms will take place at the EMBRC participating observatory stations according to the protocols described in the EMO BON Handbook, setting a minimum standard for participation to the network. DNA extraction and sequencing will be performed at a centralised facility to reduce biases and ensure consistency in the high-quality of sequencing. The data generated within this initiative will follow the FAIR data principles. The life cycle of the EMO BON data will be described in detail in the EMO BON Data Management Plan. Overall, EMBRC aims to build a long-term genomic observatory, generating cost-effective, high-quality, baseline genomic biodiversity data that will be produced in the long term.
The European ARMS programme (ARMS-MBON) has established a network of Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS) placed in the vicinity of marine stations, ports, marinas, and Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites distributed over Europe and polar regions. The aim of ARMS-MBON is to assess the status of, and changes in, hard-bottom communities of near-coast environments, using genetic methods supplemented with image analysis and visual inspection methods. ARMS are passive monitoring systems originally developed during the Census of Marine Life project for the collection of marine fauna on and near the sea floor. Similarly to settlement plates, the ARMS units are stacks of plates that mimic the complex structure of the sea bottom. They are deployed on marine substrates and colonised by marine species, and after a period of time they are recovered by a team and taken apart to see who moved in. In the ARMS-MBON programme we have been deploying units since 2018 and which remain in place a few to many months. One of our scientific goals is to identify newly arrived Non-Indigenous Species (NIS), facilitating an early warning system, and to track the migration of already known NIS in European continental waters. The data collected by the ARMS-MBON programme has the potential to be used for calculating Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) on the distribution and abundance of benthic and non-indigenous species, as well as for continental-scale research on the community ecology and biogeography of benthic invertebrates. Date generated by ARMS-MBON follows the FAIR-principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable, Wilkinson et al., 2016). The ARMS programme provides protocols and procedures for: constructing, deploying and collecting the ARMS units; processing the collected samples; and the molecular (genetic) and the image analysis. It will also describe the data flows, the data and metadata standards to be adopted, the archiving for long-term preservation, and the cataloguing to ensure the data are publicly accessible.
- Start date
- 2023-2
- End date
- 2023-12