Life on Earth most likely originated as microorganisms in the sea.  Over the past 3.5-4 billion years, marine microbes have shaped and defined Earth’s biosphere and, through their metabolism, created environmental conditions that allowed the evolution of macroorganisms and complex biological communities.  Today microbes inhabit and sustain all terrestrial and marine environments; they are truly the “unseen majority.”  Marine microbes are ubiquitous, numerous and extremely diverse in their genetic composition and metabolic capabilities.  They catalyze key transformations of carbon and associated bioelements, maintain the productivity of the oceans, consume many greenhouse gases and serve as a critical intermediary in marine food webs, linking sunlight and the large reservoir of dissolved organic matter to higher trophic levels, including fish.  Until recently, very little was known about the biology and ecology of marine microorganisms, especially their genomic and metabolic properties, and their temporal and spatial dynamics in the sea.  On 1 August 2006, the Center for Microbial Oceanography:  Research and Education (C-MORE) embarked on a decade-long journey to create and disseminate fundamental knowledge about microbes in the sea and the ecosystem services that they perform.  Advances in molecular biology, genomics, remote sensing and ecosystem modeling presented new opportunities to fuse these otherwise separate disciplines into a targeted inquiry into the microbial ecology of the oceans through an integrated Center.  From the beginning, the hallmark of C-MORE was an integration across scales of biological organization, from the genetic blueprints of microbial life to the structure and function of marine ecosystems.  C-MORE sponsored a broad range of laboratory- and field-based collaborative research efforts to increase our basic understanding of how microbiological diversity at the genomic level expresses itself at the ecosystem function level, and to transfer this new knowledge to other scientists, policymakers and the public at large.  Much of our field work was conducted at a single marine ecosystem, Station ALOHA, located 100 kilometers north of Oahu, Hawaii at a site that is characteristic of the expansive North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, one of the largest biomes on our planet.  The field research conducted at Station ALOHA covered a broad range of disciplines that we divided into four separate, but interrelated, themes:  biodiversity, metabolism, remote sensing and modeling.  Many significant “theme-specific” contributions were made, but our most fundamental achievements were from the comprehensive, integrated and collaborative investigations that crossed disciplinary boundaries and ecosystem time and space scales.  Station ALOHA is also the site of the long-term ocean time-series program dubbed the Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT), a unique NSF-funded program to understand time-varying exchanges of carbon between the atmosphere and the surface ocean, fluxes of carbon throughout the water column and into deep sea sediments, and the overall impacts of global environmental change on these processes.  With the 25-year HOT data set as a firm foundation, C-MORE was able to enhance our understanding of microbial processes on an unprecedented scale.  One key to our success was to assemble a coherent team of scientists, engineers, educators and students from a broad range of disciplines who otherwise did not have the opportunity to communicate, collaborate or design creative solutions to long-term ecosystem-scale problems.  The research and education missions of C-MORE crossed geographical, disciplinary and cultural boundaries.  C-MORE built enduring partnerships, implemented novel education and outreach programs and enhanced the diversity of human resources in oceanography and related disciplines.  C-MORE’s legacy includes a paradigm shift in the discipline of microbial oceanography, not only in new scientific understanding that was gained, but also in the approach to study very large, complex scientific questions.  The collaborative, transdisciplinary approach developed by C-MORE can also be applied to other disciplines that seek to integrate observation, theory and predictions across multiple complex scales of biological and ecological organization.  Finally, C-MORE trained a large cadre of students and post-docs who will continue to carry out the scientific and education missions of our Center for many years to come.

Last Modified: 10/30/2017
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