Estuarine collaboratories: regional and global perspectives

There is an urgent need to anticipate and manage environmental changes in estuaries, as these critical ecosystems provide services that are essential for regional and global sustainability. Collaboratively designed and operated estuarine observation and prediction systems are progressively enabling long-term and high-resolution characterizations of estuarine variability and function, thus providing a powerful foundation for stewardship activities. The benefits of these 'collaboratories' have been demonstrated regionally in various estuaries, and their broader scale potential is being explored through an emerging national and international initiative. The first part of this presentation will address the lessons learned from SATURN (http://www.stccmop.org), a mature multi-institutional 'collaboratory' for the Columbia River estuary. SATURN innovatively integrates sensors, models, flows of information, and communities of practice. This integration has fueled advances in understanding and prediction of the estuary as a complex and highly variable bioreactor, subject to shifts from global climate change and from evolving regional uses. Our focus will be on describing the aspects of the design and practice that make SATURN transformative as a scientific and management-support tool at a regional scale. The second part of the presentation will address the translation of lessons learned from and beyond SATURN into requirements for a global network of estuarine observation and prediction systems. 'Our Global Estuary' is an initiative designed to create and use such a network, to maximize the aggregate potential of estuaries as sentinels and key players in global sustainability. We will report on the main recommendations of the first planning workshop for this initiative, which will take place on October 2013.