2005 Implementation Plan of the MBARI Strategic Plan

Overview

Each year, MBARI prepares a summary for the Board of Directors of projects that the institute proposes to undertake for the following year and discusses how these projects contribute to realizing the goals of the strategic plan. The specific goals for MBARI as laid out in its Strategic Plan are as follows:

1. Emphasize areas where progress is limited by lack of technology

2. Demonstrate worth of MBARI investment in technology

3. Complement, rather than duplicate

4. Insist on teaming

5. Expand external relationships

6. Obtain outside assessment of quality of programs

7. Facilitate access to unique MBARI facilities for selected outside researchers

8. Communicate with the public the value of the oceans and the importance of MBARI research

An underlying theme for all projects that contribute to these goals is that they be characterized by excellence, creativity, and vision.

Each of the projects described below contributes to one or more of these objectives. For example, the science projects typically demonstrate, by solving science problems with MBARI equipment, the worth of prior MBARI investments in technology (#2 above). All of the development efforts are selected for their timeliness and uniqueness (#s 1 and 3). Each year MBARI adjuncts compete successfully for use of unique MBARI resources (#7). A large number of our projects are increasingly undertaken jointly with other institutions (#5), a practice which shares the cost over more funding groups and accelerates the technology transfer. Teaming relationships (#4) permeate all that MBARI does and has become part of the institutional culture.

Not all of these objectives are best met through formal projects. For example, the upcoming external evaluation of MBARI scheduled for January of 2005 targets goal #6 specifically. However, every time a new direction initiated internally at MBARI is co-funded through a competitive research grant, we also obtain a measure of the value of our efforts.  In addition to the contribution to these objectives from the official projects, there are a number of ongoing activities covered under divisional budgets that also contribute to the strategic plan. For example, the annual MBARI Open House each year attracts a large number of interested citizens from the Monterey Bay area who use the opportunity to learn a lot about the ocean and about MBARI.

The Proposal Numbers and Evaluation Process

For 2005, MBARI’s management team considered a total of 88 abstracts submitted in late July briefly describing plans for new, continuing, and externally funded projects. About 30 of those abstracts described either new efforts or renewal of projects that were slated to end in 2004. At that point in the process, the projects were evaluated on the basis of consistency with MBARI’s strategic plan, likelihood of manpower being available to complete the project, and timing with respect to other dependent efforts. Some projects were discouraged from submitting full proposals while others with similar objectives were encouraged to combine into one effort. Several of the researchers who submitted new project ideas were asked to prioritize their new efforts against those in their continuing projects.

A total of 71 projects ended up submitting full proposals for Phase I in late August. Seventeen of these are at least partially funded externally. In mid-September, the management team evaluated the full proposals, concentrating on the feasibility of the full project plan and the level of staff and financial resources that could be devoted to the effort. Sixty-three proposals were moved forward to Phase II. Emphasis this year was placed on finishing up resource-intensive projects already underway (e.g., MOOS, AUV multibeam vehicle and payload; Laser Raman Spectrometer) as opposed to starting up new efforts that would stretch the resources too thin to make significant progress. Therefore, the Management Team tried to not descope or stretch out development over additional years in order to have sufficient resources to begin many new projects. After the Phase II review, four additional efforts were dropped or postponed, leaving 59 supported projects.

The success rate for entirely new efforts seeking MBARI support (as opposed to renewals, continuations, or externally funded proposals) is about 33%, which is comparable to success rates for proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation. However, many of the new ideas that are turned down (most commonly at the abstract stage) are simply deferred to a future year, leading to an effectively higher success rate. All of these numbers are roughly similar to those of previous years.

The 59 projects selected for 2005 are all listed in Table 1. These projects include six studies to be undertaken by MBARI adjuncts (Steve Rock – Stanford, Eddie Widder -HBOI, Larry Madin - WHOI, Ken Smith – SIO, Bill Hamner – UCLA, and Barbara Romanowicz – Berkeley). Rather than being treated as independent projects, the various components of MOOS are centrally managed by Keith Raybould as one integrated project. In addition, seven smaller efforts support MBARI’s data streams, including multibeam mapping, and other infrastructure. MBARI management has made the conscious decision to treat as projects any activity that uses shared resources, such as ship time, engineering time, the machine shop, or the video lab, in order to track the use of those resources and budget efficiently.

New for 2005

Development projects slated for either scoping studies or major new resources in 2005 include:

1.      AUV Docking – Previous work in this area at MBARI has to date focused on analyzing the results of several proof-of-concept projects to determine which facets of docking (e.g., homing, connection, power transfer, information transfer, undocking, etc.) require further work and which have a clear technical direction already established. Under the leadership of Jim Bellingham, this project is now ready to go forward to implementation. The docked vehicle will be a “Dorado-light” low-cost, simple ROV (e.g., lacking the expensive inertial navigation system) suitable for short missions launched from a docking station. To provide focus, the initial science mission will be to detect and respond to tidally generated high-current events in the canyon.  The system will be implemented incrementally, the intent being to provide a scientifically useful platform with a subset of the docking capabilities in order to demonstrate the importance and usefulness of docking. The initial demonstration will involve event response and communication to shore through the dock infrastructure (likely the MARS cable) but not tackle at-sea power transfer until future years.

2.      IODP Boreholes – This scoping study will begin designing the ROV-serviced, cable-connected wellheads and control systems for borehole observatories connected to the MARS cable. We have received word from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program that the MARS boreholes could be drilled as early as mid-2005. The goal of this project is to be able to submit a proposal for external funding with realistic costs and designs.

3.      Science Instrument Interface for MARS – By leveraging off the existing MBARI project to build the instrument interface for MOOS, this effort will produce a set of system requirements suitable for connecting a wide variety of instruments to both MARS and NEPTUNE. This project will need to deliver some minimal elements of the instrument interface for MARS given the fact that installation of the cable is but one year away, but we will likely seek external funding to complete the project.

4.      Observing the Anthropogenically-Induced pH Shift in the Ocean – This exploratory project will identify what effort is needed to monitor changes in pH in the ocean, determine the effect on primary and secondary production, and develop a reliable, self-calibrating pH sensor capable of operating over a range of temperature, pressure, and salinity.

5.      MARS Node Deployment Testing and Diagnosis Tool – The deployment of the MARS observatory node is a complicated and untested procedure. This project will allow marine operations and engineering personnel to test the deployment protocols and equipment prior to installation and to develop the hardware tools necessary to test the Ethernet, voltage, and timing signals at sea.

6.      An Autonomous Bottom-Transecting Instrument Platform – Ken Smith, MBARI adjunct and future staff member, has requested MBARI’s help in building a second-generation benthic rover, ROVER II, to conduct important experiments on the uptake of organic material descending from the surface by communities at the sediment interface. ROVER I was lost at sea, and development of its follow-on has stalled at SIO on account of staffing issues. The initial plan is to demonstrate critical areas of the instrumentation and experiment procedure by connecting a simplified system to the MARS cable. The cable version will not require autonomous power or an on-board control system, and can take full advantage of the scientist at the other end of the cable for decision making.

7.      AUV Gulper – The next major AUV payload to be developed at MBARI is a water sampler that can rapidly collect large volumes of water for later analysis on shore. Although much of MBARI’s instrumentation effort has concentrated on in-situ sensors that send information, rather than data, back to shore, nevertheless there remain important analytical procedures that cannot be easily or affordably packaged for autonomous, in-situ application. The Gulper team has completed the science requirements for this new AUV payload, and will now begin the first year of a two-year development program.

Highlights from other projects for 2005 are summarized below. Emphasis here is given to new aspects and directions in projects rather than ongoing tasks that were called out in previous implementation plans. Table 2 displays a matrix of how each of the 2005 projects contributes to the Strategic Plan. The full abstracts for all projects are appended to this document.

Benthic Processes

Peter Brewer plans to carry out some controlled experiments with Ventana to explore the physical chemistry of seafloor failure associated with the presence of gases and methane hydrates. He also will be working with MIT’s Art Baggerorer on acoustic methods for detecting CO₂ droplets in the ocean. Brewer and MBARI biologist Jim Barry will be shifting the focus of their deep sea CO₂ work from considering the impacts of direct sequestration of CO₂ to anticipating the chemistry and biology of the high-CO₂ ocean of the future.

Dave Clague’s effort in 2005 will be devoted to studies of event plumes along midocean ridge segments. The contribution of these episodic events to the heat and chemistry of the ocean is poorly quantified. Clague will be using fine-grained pyroclastic deposits mapped and sampled by Tiburon to distinguish between different models for the origin of event plumes.

Charlie Paull will be taking the Western Flyer and Tiburon to southern California in 2005. One aspect of his program is to study gas-hydrate mounds in Santa Monica Basin. He hopes to get a better estimate of the volume of hydrates and whether they are thermogenic or biogenic in origin. The second part of the program is sampling a well-documented hyperpycnal flow from the Santa Clara River that occurred during the winter of 2003-2004. The southern California wildfires of 2003 left a distinctive charcoal tracer in the flow deposits that provide a unique opportunity to determine the fate of the hyperpycnal flow once it entered the canyon and to identify the characteristics of facies that are created by such events.

Bob Vrijenhoek requested some event-response ship time in 2005 to sink into Monterey Bay any dead whales that might wash ashore during the year. Almost before the ink was dry on his proposal, several whales appeared on the scene. Marine operations found that towing a dead whale off the beach and sinking it is not an easy task, but with persistence the mission was accomplished. During 2005 Vrijenhoek’s group will have the opportunity to periodically revisit the new whale fall to watch the speed with which it is colonized by scavengers.  The most recent whale was deposited near the MARS node site in the event that long-term, unaliased observation is warranted.  Vrijenhoek’s lab is also working on oligonucleotide probe development for using the ESP to detect invertebrate larvae.

The newest project to join MBARI’s benthic research portfolio is an effort by Gary Greene of MLML (25% MBARI staff member) and Steve Ward from the USGS to model mass wasting in submarine canyons. Monterey Bay has several examples of canyons with different morphologies, allowing the PIs to test various aspects of their model. MBARI ROVs will be used to gather ground truth for calibrating the physical properties and other parameters assumed in the models. Ultimately the results from this study might help MBARI design better MARS observatory experiments to monitor mass wasting events as they occur.

MBARI is planning for a return to the Gulf of California in 2006. The main field programs have already been selected in order to prepare the permit application. In contrast to the previous trip to the Gulf of California, that included a wide variety of scientific investigations, the 2006 trip will focus on benthic programs. The reason for this focus is that MBARI intends to take the new AUV mapping vehicle to the Gulf to map the seafloor in areas of interest in advance of the ROV dives. As this might be the only time in the foreseeable future that we will have both the Zephyr and the Western Flyer in the Gulf, we want to capitalize on programs for which the bathymetric, sidescan, and sub-bottom data are useful or even critical. Selected programs will be examining the tectonic transition from seafloor spreading to transform motion, benthic-pelagic coupling at seamounts, geographic heterogeneity of symbionts in chemosynthetic communities, gas hydrate venting, and benthic ecology of cold versus warm water basins. We will also be collaborating with another Packard Foundation-funded project on sustainable shrimp fisheries in the Gulf of California.

Midwater Research

Bruce Robison’s group will continue their bathypelagic midwater surveys through 2005, at which time they will have a statistically valid data set for describing this important community. Lou Zeidberg, a postdoc in the Robison lab, is using stable isotopes to trace the pathways of organic matter through the pelagic food web.

Steve Haddock will be continuing his research on new species, genera, and even orders of comb jellies. His lab will be completing work describing bioluminescence and fluorescence in organisms where they have never been seen and serving functions that have never been anticipated.

Again this year, MBARI adjunct Larry Madin will be using ROV time to continue his study on a new genus and species of salp. He will be estimating feeding rate based on fecal production in order to quantify the role of these grazers in the cycling of particulate matter through the midwater. Bill Hamner from UCLA and Eddie Widder from HBOI will be using the video archives to document behaviors of shrimp and lobate ctenophores and the effect of thruster noise on the observation of megafauna, respectively.

Upper Ocean Biogeochemistry

Ken Johnson will be focusing on a potential new method for transporting iron in the upper ocean: vertical migration of phytoplankton. It has already been established that phytoplankton migrate vertically to acquire nitrate below the photic zone, causing the position of the “nitracline” (the depth to which nitrate is depleted) to fall below the photic zone. Observations that the ferricline is below the nitracline suggest that a similar mechanism is at work. Tiburon (ideally outfitted with HDTV) will be used to test this hypothesis.

Francisco Chavez continues his leadership in upper-ocean biogeochemical time series, using primarily the MBARI moorings and AUVs. Specific science objectives include studying how the North Pacific Decadal Oscillation impacts the California Current, the central California upwelling system, and the productivity of Monterey Bay.

John Ryan has proposed to continue his research on thin layers in the ocean and coastal plumes. Preliminary data suggests that these two phenomena are affected by internal tides and ocean tidal phase, respectively. Using data collected in 2004 on the vertical and horizontal scales of Salinas River and Elkhorn Slough plumes and the gradients in physical and chemical variables, he created the hardware and software for an underway mapping system. This system is being ported to AUV Dorado for future plume mapping. Ryan will also be using this vehicle for a major ONR-funded field program in Monterey Bay in September, 2005, to study the formation and dissipation of thin biological layers.

Chris Scholin’s lab continues to develop novel molecular probes to detect micro-organisms of interest with the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP). With a benthic version coming on line, the Deep-ESP, they will be developing a new array of probes for benthic organisms.

Jim Bellingham will be continuing his involvement in AOSN (Autonomous Ocean Sampling Networks), with the goals of creating economic platforms and developing strategies to use their capabilities effectively in the study of transient oceanographic processes. This effort is highly leveraged against initial investments by ONR, and is well connected to external collaborators from 16 institutions with complementary capabilities. The strategy employed for developing AOSN has been to couple incremental technology developments to science-driven field programs.  The next challenge for AOSN is to develop an event response scenario that couples AOSN capabilities to the emerging MOOS system, including the docking effort.

MOOS Observatory

The coming year is slated to be the last major development effort for the MOOS mooring system, in preparation for a major field program at Shepard Meander in 2006 as a complete observatory system test. The test will involve multiple seafloor instrument nodes (BINs) powered from and communicating with the surface buoy through the active OEM cable in real time. A few of the important developments for 2005 include making improvements in the design of the floats attached to the mooring cable, complete testing of the cable both in the lab and at sea, and implementing BIN to BIN networking. Plug and play instrument networking and configuration is expected to be ready in time for this deployment, and has been successfully demonstrated on the CIMT mooring currently in Monterey Bay.

In addition to completing all developments necessary for this ambitious experiment, the MOOS team will be conducting a cost/benefit analysis for this new system. What unique science can be accomplished with this system? In which circumstances is it the most affordable technology for getting the information of interest? What will be the long-term costs (e.g., once non-recurring engineering has ended) of installing and maintaining MOOS mooring systems? Once the MOOS development has ended, it will still be necessary to integrate seamlessly into the MOOS architecture auxiliary platforms, such as AUV docking stations, vertical profilers, etc.

One aspect of MOOS that will not be completed in the coming year is the Shore Side Data System (SSDS). To date the team has focused on developing the core system (data ingest, archive, and data access functions) that utilizes the metadata generated by the new plug and work instrumentation capabilities being developed under MOOS.  Development of these new capabilities has been incrementally tested by supporting scientists in real time on specific deployments (e.g., AOSN, MOOS test mooring, AUVs, CIMT etc.) This trend will continue for the Shepard Meander experiment. In 2005, the team will expand query capabilities based upon metadata and data searches, data subsetting and merging,  and investigate automated data validation. Data security is likely to be an issue if the system becomes more widely used for large observatory operations such as NEPTUNE.

The MARS project expects to be laying cable and installing the node in Monterey Bay in 2005. Although the permitting process is still far from complete, all of the major technical challenges now appear to be well in hand. MBARI will soon be receiving all of the sub systems from the various design teams (WHOI, University of Washington, JPL, MariPro, Alcatel and ODI) to be integrated into the MARS node at MBARI and tested prior to deployment on Smooth Ridge in water about 1-km deep.

ROV / AUV Enhancements and Upgrades

Staff members from DMO, Engineering, and Science collaborated on an assessment of the future improvements for ROV Tiburon needed to support MBARI’s observatory and other science goals. There was widespread agreement that Tiburon is underpowered and carries too small a payload to meet the needs in the near future. Furthermore, the operating system for the vehicle is so specialized and complicated that it has deterred the vehicle’s pilots from making incremental upgrades to keep the vehicle at the state of the art. The team considered a variety of options ranging from custom in-house build to the purchase of a “to order” vehicle. The basic trade studies included capital costs, internal resource and support requirements, and risk analysis.  Much has changed since MBARI began to design and build Tiburon in house in 1991. First, the nature of the scientific mission has changed from passive observation and exploration to sophisticated sampling and manipulation of sea floor equipment and experiments. Second, a much larger number of research institutions nationally and internationally are routinely using ROVs as a basic element of their marine programs. Third, as the offshore oil industry has moved into deeper water and scientists have begun to place a higher premium on power and payload, the vehicle requirements for industry and science have begun to converge. In response, a number of commercial companies now offer vehicles well suited to scientific endeavors. It is no longer the best use of MBARI engineering resources to perform an in-house build. Therefore, MBARI is anticipating replacing Tiburon with a customized commercial vehicle in the 2007-2008 time frame. In the meantime, the team will determine the best way to keep the current vehicle operating reliably, and will continue to refine specifications for the new ROV. In 2005, a new tool sled controller will be developed to allow them to operate independently from the current Tiburon control system. This step should ease future integration of the existing tool sleds into the new vehicle and will allow us to better plan integration of other existing vehicle subsystems into the new vehicle control system.

MBARI adjunct Steve Rock from Stanford University proposes to implement a new navigation system for AUVs that uses existing seafloor topographic maps for precise positioning. This capability would allow lower-cost vehicles (without the expensive inertial navigation systems) and operation close to the seafloor in areas lacking transponder nets.

For many years the MBARI scientists have been eager to install an HDTV camera on Tiburon in order to get the same quality video images that they enjoy from Ventana. Size and weight constraints of HDTV cameras have so far been show stoppers. Finally, technology has caught up with MBARI needs, and there is now an off-the-shelf camera system that meets the size and weight restrictions. This camera will be installed on Tiburon in 2005 in advance of the expedition to the Gulf of California in the following year. The camera chosen, from Insite Pacific Camera Systems, can also be ported over to the new Tiburon in several years’ time.

New In-Situ Instruments

Barry and Johnson will be developing a lander system for sensors used in the eddy-flux correlation method to measure consumption of oxygen and nitrate in the benthic boundary layer. By measuring the correlation between oxygen or nitrate concentration and the vertical component of current velocity, it is possible to estimate the fluxes. The test system will benefit from interactive control and will generate high data rates. Therefore, the plan is to deploy the prototype eddy flux lander at the MOOS test-mooring site, using the active OEM cable to provide two-way communication to shore.

Goals for Ken Johnson’s chemical sensors lab for 2005 are to expand the use of DigiSCAN for ammonia measurements. They continue to expand the reliability and endurance of both ISUS (In-Situ Ultraviolet Spectrophotometer) and DigiSCAN. The former has operated successfully on M1 for 9 months with minimal servicing. The lab will also be investigating whether OSMOSamplers can be used to acquire uncontaminated water samples for analysis of trace amounts of iron.

DORISS (Deep Ocean Raman In Situ Spectrometer) will transition in 2005 from engineering development to science deployment. Prior to the transition, a few components will be upgraded to provide weight and size reduction along with greater sensitivity. The team also proposes to add a small piston and filter arrangement to the insertion probe to allow novel pore-water sensing capability. ONR is discussing with the team the possibility of building an AUV-deployed version of DORISS.

Scott Jensen and Chris Scholin are making excellent progress on the second-generation Environmental Sample Processor (2G-ESP) with support form both MBARI and NOPP/NSF. The integration of the new instrument will be completed this year, allowing extensive testing next year in the lab, test tank, raw seawater tank, and Monterey Bay. The new version will be complete with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to ease programming for deployments and other operations.

Zbigniew Kolber continues development of BiOSA (Biophysical Oceanographic Sensor Array), a compact instrument frame carrying a wide range of sensors to measure the biological and chemical state of the ocean. The development team has found a commercial controller that obviates the need for a custom-built controller. In 2005, they will complete the application software, continue work on sensors, and field test the instrument frame.

MBARI will also continue the deployment of a broadband seismometer in Monterey Bay under the leadership of UC-Berkeley Professor Barbara Romanowicz. Her group has been working on methods to remove oceanographic noise from the data in this shallow coastal setting. MBARI engineers are beginning to scope out how this instrument will be attached to the MARS cabled observatory.

Data Management and Information Outreach

The VARS (Video Annotation and Reference System) is ready for external dissemination as it moves into production and maintenance mode in 2005. The VARS team will be examining several methods for making the MBARI product into a more robust, generic version for use by outside organizations. Possibilities include creating a partnership with a commercial software supplier, making the code open source, or working directly with other research institutions interesting in adapting VARS to their organizations. Once a design review has occurred to select an option, MBARI will organize a hands-on user workshop to introduce the product to potential users.

George Matsumoto and Randy Kochevar from the Monterey Bay Aquarium (MBA) head up the Joint Projects Committee (JPC). In 2005 they will continue collaboration on the EARTH near-real-time workshops that develop, with teachers, the tools to enable observatory data to be used in the classroom. The expertise and experience of the education department at MBA has been instrumental in the success of these workshops to date. In 2005 the EARTH project will be more tightly coupled to developments with the Shore Side Data System to ensure that needs of educators as well as scientists are considered in designing the data archive and retrieval system. The JPC is also looking into the feasibility of erecting an MBARI/MBA kiosk in the Moss Landing area. The budget in 2005 includes funds to upgrade aging portions of the microwave link that connect Aquarium audiences to research in the deep sea.

The AVED (Automated Video Event Detection) project is developing technology to automatically process images for event detection and for recognition of target biological species. For 2005 the AVED team will focus on supplying the technology that will allow scientists to rapidly rescan years of video archives for a specific species or group of interest for a certain scientific question. Currently identification at that level is not routinely done in the standard “outline” mode of annotation performed by the video lab. More detailed annotations have been done for selected dives with particular species in mind, but often it is years later that new species of interest become apparent. Initial estimates suggest that use of AVED could reduce by an order of magnitude the effort needed to accomplish single-target quantitative annotations.

Infrastructure Projects

In addition to setting aside resources to maintain MBARI’s ships, ROVs, and moorings, all of which support a variety of science and engineering activities, MBARI will be establishing a community facility to operate the MARS observatory. This project will be jointly funded and executed with the ORION project office and the National Science Foundation. The facility will be responsible for helping users prepare their instruments and experiments for MARS, providing test and deployment procedures, maintaining the infrastructure, scheduling approved experiments, operating the data management system, maintaining the MARS website, etc. Experience gained by operating MARS will help make NEPTUNE more successful when it comes on line.

Table 1: 2005 MBARI Projects

(bold indicates new or substantially rescoped projects)