She et al. 
Integrated Coastal and Biological Observing 
Frontiers In Marine Science | www.frontlersln.org 
2 
July 2019 | Volume 6 | Article 314 
INTRODUCTION 
The coastal ocean is the water body from the shelf-break 
to the shore, including estuary waters. Presently about 40% 
of the world’s population live within 100 km of the coast. 
Anthropogenic activities within the watershed and the newly 
emerging maritime economy initiatives severely affect the coastal 
water. Monitoring of the coastal seas, therefore, becomes essential 
in providing marine information services for the maritime 
economy, for protection of marine environment and ecosystems 
and for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Coastal ocean 
observing has been developed in either national or regional level 
in the past decades, e.g., in Europe, United States, Australia, 
Japan, and China. Several papers or books discuss integrated and 
global observing systems (Malone and Cole, 2000; Babin et al., 
2008; Liu et al., 2015). Early coastal monitoring components 
were designed to fit for specific purposes, e.g., operational 
applications, climate monitoring, environmental assessment, or 
fishery management. The monitoring activities were also carried 
out by different sectors with specific governmental mandates. 
In the last decade, integrated coastal ocean observing systems 
have been designed and developed to fit for multiple purposes. 
The US IOOS (Integrated Ocean Observing System) is a 
national observing infrastructure to cover the coastal shelf sea 
waters of the United States, managed by several regions. The 
IOOS was designed to provide data to support multi-purpose 
applications, ranging from operational services, climate change 
adaptation, maritime economy to ecosystem-based management, 
with a timely, operational data delivery (Corredor, 2018). In 
Australia, the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS, Hill 
et al., 2009) is similar to the United States system but was 
designed as a research infrastructure. Since major data streams 
of IMOS are delivered timely, they are also useful for operational 
forecasting and management of marine natural resources, etc. 
An important feature of both IOOS and IMOS is that they 
were built upon modern technologies e.g., gliders, high frequency 
radars, and animal borne instruments which have been identified 
as emerging technologies for future GOOS (Global Ocean 
Observing System) coastal and biological observing (Moltmann 
et al., 2019). In Europe, the European Regional Operational 
Oceanography Systems (ROOSs) also have integrated these 
technologies. In addition, ferrybox and shallow water Argo 
profilers are extensively used (She, 2018; Le-Traon et al., 
2019). The ROOS observations were designed for operational 
oceanography, but can also be used for almost all other purposes, 
due to their operational online delivery, open and free access. 
There are significant efforts in integrating the ocean observing in 
the operational oceanography community. In the coastal ocean, 
the future integration aims to improve the cost-effectiveness and 
support the development of operational ecology (She et al., 2016) 
and seamless modeling (forecasting, reanalysis, and projection). 
However, there are significant gaps in observations and 
cost-effectiveness in the existing online monitoring programs. 
On the other hand, there is already a significant amount of 
coastal and biological observations being collected for supporting 
ecosystem-based management and climate change adaptation 
and mitigation, as is coordinated by ICES (International Centre 
for Exploring the Sea) for fishery and regional conventions 
for environmental assessment in Europe and National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries in the United States. 
However, most of the data are delivered offline which do not fit 
the operational needs. There is an urgent need to integrate the 
online and offline monitoring programs to fill the observational 
and technological gaps. Instead of giving a comprehensive review 
of the existing coastal and biological observing, this paper aims at 
categorizing the “integrated observing” and how the existing gaps 
in coastal and biological observations can be filled through the 
integration. The integration discussed in this paper is at the scale 
of a regional sea basin, surrounded by one or more countries. 
INTEGRATED COASTAL OCEAN 
OBSERVING 
The integrated observing can be divided into three categories: fit- 
for-purpose integration, parameter integration, and instrumental 
integration, which addresses three stages of marine data value 
chain - observing, data management, and data usage. The fit-for- 
purpose integration is to integrate ocean observing from multiple 
sectors so that the observations can be measured for multiple 
purposes with improved data adequacy and cost-effectiveness. 
The parameter integration brings marine data of all parameters 
from air, water, biota, seabed to human activities together 
and makes them timely accessible. For the final data usage, 
the instrumental integration will produce the best monitoring 
products through integrating different monitoring components, 
e.g., in situ observations, remote sensing, and modeling. The 
three kinds of integration are illustrated in Figure 1. In order to 
maximize the value of the observing system, it is essential that the 
three kinds of integration are all addressed. 
Fit-for-Purpose Integration 
According to its purpose, ocean observing can be divided 
into governmental, research, and commercial activities. The 
governmental activity covers operational, environmental, fishery, 
and hydrological sectors. For a given sector, the observing is 
often coordinated at the regional sea scale via an “observational 
network” consisting of governmental agencies from different 
countries and/or regions, such as ROOSs and Northeast Pacific 
cooperation (Barth et al., 2019). Through enhanced coordination 
and integration among different governmental observing 
networks, research and commercial observing programs, the 
fit-for-purpose integration aims at filling the observation gaps 
and improving cost-effectiveness. 
The multi-network integration can be implemented in 
three stages: first, a fit-for-purpose assessment on data 
adequacy, appropriateness, and cost-effectiveness of the existing 
observational networks has to be carried out to identify the 
gaps. In Europe, the data adequacy assessment has been carried 
out by the EMODnet (European Marine Observational Data 
network) Sea Basin Checkpoint projects for eleven social-benefit 
areas (Miguez et al., 2019). Second, the harmonized sampling 
scheme should be designed to fill the gaps for all purposes. For 
example, through improvement of near real time delivery of