OceanExpert | Document

Author(s)	Mark J Costello, J Frederick Grassle, Yunqing Zhang, Karen Stocks & Edward Vanden Berghe
Summary	BECAUSE OF THEIR AREA, VOLUME AND DIVERSITY OF LIFE, THE world’s oceans are the dominant component of the biosphere. Thus, an assessment of life on Earth must, in major part, be an assessment of life in the world’s oceans – a Census of Marine Life. The complexity of the marine ecosystem, and its interactions with social and political systems, demand an interdisciplinary and integrated approach. Traditional, discipline-centred research methodologies yield a wealth of snapshots of the complex and ever-changing marine world. The challenges are to fill the gaps in these insights, to synthesise coherent patterns of marine life in space and time,and to develop testable hypotheses and predictive models of the origin and maintenance of these patterns.
Doc Type	Information Document
Status	Published on 05 May 2005
This document is in the list(s):	IODE Books and Information Documents