In early February, the Government of Bermuda released a public report titled “The State of Bermuda’s Marine Waters: A Snapshot of Bermuda’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) from the Coastline to 200 nautical miles (nm).” It was released as part of the Bermuda Ocean Prosperity Programme (BOPP), a partnership between the Government of Bermuda, the Waitt Institute, and BIOS designed to sustainably protect and manage the island’s ocean resources. BOPP is also working with the Government and local industries, such as tourism and fisheries, to diversify national revenue and support the development of a “blue economy” that balances the sustainable use of ocean resources with marine ecosystem health.

The Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM), held jointly between the American Geophysical Union, the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, and The Oceanography Society, is one of the largest international ocean sciences conferences. The 2022 meeting, which was scheduled to be held in Honolulu, Hawaii will now take place virtually due to COVID-19 related concerns on February 24 through March 4. More than 5,300 scientists from 75 different countries will participate.

In 1991, BIOS became a site for the competitive and prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, which provides participants with the opportunity to work alongside the Institute’s faculty and staff on research projects in a variety of topics in ocean sciences.

Reef scientist Eric Hochberg is principal investigator in a NASA field campaign that will survey more of the world’s coral reefs than ever before, and in greater detail. Credit Eric Hochberg

The GREAT BARRIER REEF, transposed to North America’s west coast, would stretch from Baja California to British Columbia. “How do you study that big of an area by doing hour-long hikes?,” says Eric Hochberg, a marine biologist at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences. Yet for a long time, scientists studying coral have essentially had to do just that. Since the 1950s, says Hochberg, the state of the art has been a mask and a scuba tank. Scientists studying coral reefs do so an hour at a time, until their air runs out.

Coral reefs have almost always been studied up close, by scientists in the water looking at small portions of larger reefs to gather data and knowledge about the larger ecosystems. But NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is taking a step back and getting a wider view, from about 23,000 ft above.

After six weeks in Australia, NASA’s COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) has completed its campaign along the world’s largest reef structure—the Great Barrier Reef. Eric Hochberg, BIOS reef scientist and CORAL principle investigator, says he’s pleased with the “successful conclusion to the first of four field campaigns designed to shed light on the condition and function of representative reef ecosystems around the world.”

After two years, the comprehensive review paper of the NASA Surface Biology and Geology (SBG) Algorithms Working Group, representing the work of 60 scientists from 40 institutions in seven countries, was published last month in the scientific journal Remote Sensing of Environment.

On June 8, seven BIOS employees will take part in a virtual career fair hosted by the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI) in honor of World Oceans Day. The event’s theme, “The Ocean: Life & Livelihoods,” is designed to help local high school and college students explore the wide variety of career opportunities that exist in fields related to ocean science.

Earlier this year, Eric Hochberg, a reef systems ecologist at BIOS, was awarded two grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to continue lines of investigation stemming from the four-year NASA COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL) mission. Hochberg was principal investigator of CORAL (2015–2019), which utilized a state-of-the-art airborne sensor, called PRISM, to produce the first comprehensive assessment of reef condition for a large portion of the world’s reefs.