Testing biodiversity hypotheses in the marine environment by linking in-situ biodiversity observations of marine predators to gridded environmental data fields creates two distinct kinds of scaling…

This is a grant awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of Delaware to conduct research on testing biodiversity hypotheses in the marine environment. The $776,902.00 grant will support the analysis of animal tracking data from the Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) program, which collected data on over 23 pelagic species in the North Pacific. The research aims to understand the impact of observational grain size on predicting animal locations and the effect of biological scaling on these predictions, using environmental data from satellites and ocean models. The award does not have a set-aside designation. The University of Delaware is a private, non-profit, 1862 land grant institution that frequently partners with federal agencies like NASA, USDA, and DOD on a variety of research and service contracts across disciplines.

Testing biodiversity hypotheses in the marine environment by linking in-situ biodiversity observations of marine predators to gridded environmental data fields creates two distinct kinds of scaling problems. The first problem is that the temporal and spatial grain size of gridded environmental predictors does not match the time or space scale of in-situ biodiversity observations (e.g. animal location). Therefore, assumptions need to be made about how discrete biodiversity observations, taken at the scales of meters and seconds, are represented by coarser satellite data or model output, often taken at the scales of kilometers and days. The second problem is that biodiversity itself scales along with organismal size, metabolic, trophic, and taxonomic levels. There are now many observations on marine pelagic predators that show their movement across large ocean basins. These databases cover organisms representing a variety of sizes, physiologies, and trophic levels across diverse taxa. Therefore, these animal tracking data, in the context of gridded environmental data fields from both satellites and models, represent a unique opportunity to understand the impact of observational grain size on organismal location predictions and the effect biological scaling has on these predictions. This analysis will make use of the extraordinary dataset from the tagging of pacific predators (topp) program, funded by the census of marine life. Topp was one of the largest dedicated electronic tagging studies ever conducted. IT deployed over 4,000 electronic tags on 23 pelagic species, resulting in almost 275,000 animal tracking days of data in the north pacific. This effort provided an unprecedented view of how mobile pelagic species use open ocean habitats, yielding new insight into oceanic ecosystems and specifically habitat use, migratory corridors, hot spots, and behaviors of these species. Tagged animals included representatives from every group of marine vertebrates and included species that ranged greatly in size (ranging from fish to blue whales), physiology (endotherms and ectotherms) as well as trophic level (ranging from secondary consumers to apex predators). This uniquely rich and comprehensive dataset will be used to test both grain size and biological scaling hypotheses in the marine environment, in conjunction with environmental data drawn from satellite observations of sea surface temperature and chlorophyll-a, as well as from the data assimilating reanalysis of the hybrid-coordinate ocean model (hycom).