Year-round automated observations of ecological processes in coastal waters

Recently, a 6-year program of research and development, "Interdisciplinary Marine Environmental Prediction In The Atlantic Region", terminated after successfully demonstrating an integrated, interdisciplinary coastal observation and modeling system that reported data and forecasts to users and researchers in near-real time with innovative web-based resources. This was a first for Canada, and one of the first in the world. One of the project's legacies, an instrumented telemetered buoy with a potent system for data management and presentation, was recently deployed in Bedford Basin, Nova Scotia to complement the Bedford Institute of Oceanography's Bedford Basin Plankton Monitoring Program, a 16-year time series (weekly) of the state of the plankton ecosystem in Atlantic Canada's best studied coastal embayment. The addition of continuous measurements of physical, chemical and biological variability from the renamed Bedford Basin Ocean Monitoring Buoy represents a transformational improvement to the Bedford Basin time series; in turn, continued weekly sampling provided by the Bedford Institute of Oceanography provides valuable ground-truth data and additional measurements that add tremendous value to the continuous, but sometimes indirect, measures of ocean variability. The time-series station is now a unique resource for research on coastal ecosystems and how they can be effectively monitored. The newly integrated monitoring program uses a buoy that, because of icing, cannot be deployed during the early spring, when the coastal waters of Nova Scotia are most dynamic. Also, it lacks automated measurements of nitrate and some water quality parameters that are commonly measured in coastal waters. We request equipment to provide these missing capabilities, thereby establishing a state-of-the-art coastal observation system in support of a rich and continuing program of collaborative research.