What Next
Challenges
1. How to amortize and prioritize the unknown? - Census 2010 created an accessible baseline
for what we know about life in the ocean, but, perhaps more importantly, it also defined what wedon’t know. Most excitingly, it demonstrated a wide array of successful technologies for turning
most of the unknowns into knowns, so we can continue the age of discovery and exploration
efficiently. A decade was not enough to complete the work, but now we know that it can becompleted with time and money. Most of the projects laid out systematic programs for
efficiently gathering representative pictures of their habitat or realm. There is not enough time ormoney to sample every football field of the seafloor or every seamount for Census 2020, but weknow that that is not necessary. Unfortunately, we also know that some habitats are under
extreme pressure from global climate changes that cannot be reversed. Unless nations globally
decide to pull out all the stops and invest in a “race to the ocean” on the scale of the “race to themoon”, the first challenge for Census 2020 has to be to amortize and prioritize the unknown.
How do we balance the complete unknown, like the meso- and bathypelagic against easier, butmore critical unknowns? There are some realms that are unlikely to be impacted in 50 years andothers that will be impacted in 5. Can we identify 50 regions of the global ocean that absolutely
must be preserved, or provide guidance for triage? The imminent effects of warming andacidification on coral reefs for example mean that they have to be a priority or species will likely
disappear before we know they exist. The ice oceans are another clear priority. Similarly, othercoastal habitats have been shown to be severely impacted by removals and pollution that arereversible, and these need to be monitored.
2. How to balance discovery and monitoring? - Census 2010 has provided a legacy of
protocols that will allow the Ocean Observing community to monitor changing biologicalpatterns as cheaply and efficiently as it monitors physical and chemical changes – on a global
scale. These will work most effectively in the coastal regions and in the shallows of the openocean. These are the areas that are most impacted, but also most accessible to regulation that has
been shown capable of reversing negative trends. Clearly, monitoring is essential both tounderstand rates of change and to document that regulations are producing desired effects.
Unfortunately, we know that governments place a higher priority on resolving crises than onpleasant surprises from the unknown, so Census 2020 will have to work very hard to ensure abalance between discovery and monitoring. This is a potentially divisive issue among the Census
community that we have worked so hard to create and grow. We cannot let governments focus
only on the cheap, short-term answers, when we have identified the big questions.
3. Can we frame the Census as a ‘macroscope’? - One way to ensure that funding flows in abalanced way to Census 2020, is to make sure society recognizes that it is more than “stampcollection”, an accusation frequently heard in the early days of Census 2010. Most government
agencies charged with managing the ocean globally now recognize that they must manage wholeecosystems not just single species. Providing such “ecosystem based management” remains achallenge, but it is becoming clear that you must know both what species are in the system andhow and when they interact. Census 2010 showed that it could provide such information. One
concept that emerged in the Highlights report was the Census as a ‘macroscope’ – a way ofseeing the big picture by sharing and merging information from a wide range of technologies
using a wide range of analytical approaches. Complex analyses of OBIS data are one

macroscopic approach, but the idea of an ‘ecoscope’, the hardware for a macroscope, developedin early meetings of the Census 2020 group. This could be a ship outfitted to look at a variety ofunique sites identified by Census 2010 looking from top to bottom and microbes to whales using
technologies from microbial DNA to sonar to ROVs to satellite tracking to understand theinteractions at all trophic levels in particular ecosystems. Are ecosystems linked vertically aswell as horizontally? This approach would provide balance between new discoveries andmanagement applications and could be a valuable ‘Trojan Horse’ to reach funding agencies
globally.
4. How to deliver effective ocean management as a Census output? - The press generally
acknowledges that Census 2010 has done extremely well at diversity and distribution, but is lessconvinced that it was very good a counting fish – abundance. This is a challenge that Census
2020 must deal with. One counterargument has been that agencies globally spend billions ofdollars annually counting fish, but it really hasn’t done much good. One reason that the Census
2010 showing on abundance was less than expected was that agencies were much less willing toshare their abundance data with OBIS than other kinds of data. One approach may be that, since
OBIS is now an arm of the IOC to which countries donate their physical data through National
Ocean Data Centres, they should also be obliged to submit abundance data by the same route.
The macroscope concept could be linked to this approach in two ways: first by pointing out thatpast management failures can often be traced to not looking a the big picture and second by
ensuring that when the ‘ecoscope’ is pointed at a particular habitat it acquires abundance data at
multiple trophic levels. Clearly, the next step toward making Census 2020 relevant and ensuring
regular decadal assessments is to demonstrate direct applications for effectively managing theocean.
5. How much biodiversity is enough? – This is an often asked question by the media andagencies. It is a double-edged sword that agencies like to interpret as, “If we have all of thecommercial species, why do we need all that other stuff?” A popular recent media quote was,“Suppose you are looking out the window of a plane and a rivet pops out of the wing. A whilelater another one pops out. You ask the flight attendant how many rivets can pop out before thewing falls off. She doesn’t know.” This is really the fundamental scientific question ofbiodiversity. What are all the species doing out there? Do they all matter in delivery of
ecosystem services or are some more important than others? How can we use the resources
created by Census 2020 to begin answering this question in a serious way for a wide variety ofmarine habitats?
Grand Challenge
Can we frame the Census as an “essential service”? - Census 2010 proved that it can be done,
Census 2020 needs to prove that it must be done. Society must recognize that it cannot survive
without the ocean and that recovery of the ocean cannot be assured unless we monitor it on aregular basis and continue to discover its deep biodiversity secrets. There is a pressing need for
greater investment in both exploration and monitoring, but to justify this the Census community
needs to move from being a club of peers to an organization providing essential services. Census
2010 has left these peers uniquely qualified to tackle this Challenge because of its demonstrated
ability to share data and think macroscopically.