Scientific

The power of this initiative comes from the international partnerships that are required to ensure reliable and thorough data collection.  Many internationally-renowned scientists will join with scientists from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, to lead OTN – the world’s most ambitious effort to date to address climate change, ocean modeling and marine resource management.

For this project, the world’s oceans have been divided into 14 regions.  Through the strength and respect of academic colleagues around the world, all of these regions will be well-represented.  Institutions such as the University of Tasmania, the University of Hawaii and Rhodes University in South Africa have joined the network.  Stanford University, Hokkaido University (Japan) and the Centro de Ciências do Mar (Portugal) are just a few of the other international collaborators. 

Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) operates a similar project on Canada’s west coast.  Based in British Columbia, it uses the same technology that is proposed for OTN to track the movement of young wild salmon from Oregon to the Alaskan panhandle.

The Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) research project explores the Pacific, using a carefully selected group of animals from its ecosystems to gather data about their world. TOPP scientists tag individuals from 21 species of marine predators in the Eastern Pacific to obtain an "organism's eye" view of their world.

Both POST and TOPP are projects of the Census of Marine Life (CoML), an international endeavor to determine what lives, has lived and will live in the world's oceans. Essentially, OTN will integrate and globalize the technologies demonstrated by POST and TOPP.