Latin America and the Caribbean lack coordinated efforts to use DNA‑based data to address marine biodiversity loss.

To bridge this gap, regional institutions created LACOBON, the Latin American and Caribbean Ocean Biomolecular Observation Network, first presented at the 2024 Ocean Decade Conference and COP16, where it received broad support.

Its initial phase focuses on capacity‑building, shared training, and identifying regional gaps in biomolecular monitoring.

Twenty institutions have already joined, supporting eDNA sampling, laboratory work, and the adoption of low‑cost, FAIR technologies.

Members formalized a commitment to strengthen collaboration, ocean literacy, and informed decision‑making.

LACOBON is now developing governance, sustainability plans and research priorities, contributing directly to OBON and advancing UN Ocean Decade and CBD goals through standardized, interoperable eDNA monitoring

A focus is to understand pan-European biodiversity across 21 coastal countries and 35 marine labs from the Mediterranean to Arctic seas.

New data is being harmonized with existing data into an open-access data hub, leveraging international infrastructures, and generating transformative, cross-technologies/cross-scales standard marine biodiversity knowledge.

This knowledge will inform and constrain:

1. new theories and models of marine biodiversity ecological and evolutionary dynamics and drivers, at taxonomic and functional scales,
2. a portfolio of novel holistic indicators of marine ecosystem health,
3. innovative methods and protocols for economic and legal valuations of marine biodiversity and services.

Our goal is to build a citizen-powered ocean observing network that generates large-scale, spatio-temporal biodiversity data from under-sampled offshore waters. With an initial focus on the South Pacific — spanning New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, New Caledonia, and Australia — we equip cruising yachts with simple eDNA sampling kits through our Pacific Rally network, turning every voyage into a scientific expedition. Our offshore racing programme extends this reach further still, partnering with elite ocean racers in events such as the Vendée Globe and The Ocean Race to capture eDNA from remote, rarely sampled waters at the extremes of the global ocean. Citizens of the Sea is creating resources that enable broad-scale deployment of marine eDNA, including a growing bioarchive of genetic samples for future reanalysis; baselines to detect climate-driven shifts in species distribution; and biodiversity datasets published openly through GBIF and OBIS to support governments, NGOs, and communities in strengthening marine management and protection.

The project is led by Adam Martiny (University of California Irvine and Technical University Denmark), Luke Thompson (NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and Mississippi State University), Harriet Alexander (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution), Jason Graff (Oregon State University), Nicole Poulton (Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences), and Sophie Clayton (UK National Oceanography Centre).

Project information is available at https://biogoship.org/ and https://github.com/biogoship

Bottom: L4 buoy with PML Pioneer + RoCSI].

Autonomous samplers and sensors for marine ‘omics

TechOmics is an initiative to design and develop diverse autonomous deployable biomolecular sensors and samplers to map and understand marine life. Our ongoing developments increase the performance and usability of sensors and samplers to meet the needs of the ocean observing community, primarily in the North Atlantic, UK and Europe. Technology can only be developed through sustained funding and thus our programme is as diverse as the many leveraged projects that fund it. Research in our team ranges from deep sea biodiversity to marine microbiology and biogeochemistry, and target assays for sensors are primarily developed to understand water borne threats to human health such as harmful algae.

Leveraging the wealth of time-series knowledge of, and access to, the Western Channel Observatory and the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey, our programme will collect complementary biodiversity data at scale. This will involve the demonstration and application of our technologies, and the design and development to increase robustness for long-term deployment and for mechanical integrity, amplifying the value of large-scale biodiversity observing programmes.

Basic knowledge of the spatiotemporal occurrence of populations in marine ecosystems of species is essential for their management. While traditional population identification methods have often failed to resolve these issues, genomic methods have revealed clarity in the identification of marine populations, and the underlying mechanisms tunings their distributions. A key player in ecosystems throughout the north-eastern Atlantic having a complex population structure is the commercially important and highly valued Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus).

HERPOPS, based on the use of innovative genomic research, including wild populations with up to 100 years of data, will explore the processes influencing population structure in relation to climate change of herring. A recently established genomic method using population-diagnostic single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers will be used to identify the population of origin for individual herring. By applying this genomic method over a large-scale area, both in space and time, this project will obtain completely new and in-depth information about the spatiotemporal distribution of herring populations. Furthermore, HERPOPS will apply environmental DNA (eDNA) analyses to identify small-scale dynamics of spring and autumn spawning herring on a local spawning ground. This will help to answer if spawning type switching is a prevalent trait affecting metapopulation dynamics.

HERPOPS aims to take the advantage of the new knowledge to assess the abundance of different populations having a dynamic mixing. Genomic results will be directly implemented by new novel research on assessment models and future management strategies to secure long-term sustainable exploitation while maintaining intraspecific biodiversity. The project outcomes will have a direct impact on the advisory process for several populations inhabiting the different ecosystems.

This project will expand access to marine biodiversity knowledge, particularly in underrepresented regions, while strengthening engagement with the ocean worldwide. Building on the success of the first eDNA expeditions (2022-2024), this new phase will scale up sampling efforts, increase data collection frequency, and broaden taxonomic coverage to achieve a full tree-of-life biodiversity analysis.

By ensuring rapid data turnaround and integration with global databases, in particular OBIS, the project will make eDNA data more accessible and useful. The eDNA data will be used for the development of indicators, increasing the benefit of eDNA data at large. Education will be central to the initiative and will foster local ownership, and build technical capacity to monitor and protect marine biodiversity in the face of climate change.

Whales and polar bears in a petri dish: decoding marine mammal toxicology through in vitro and in silico approaches

Large marine mammals, including polar bears and whales, fill important niches as mid or top predators in marine food chains. Their high energy intake is often accompanied with elevated levels of contaminants having bioaccumulating and biomagnifying properties.

Although receiving a lot of public attention, the massive hunting of large marine mammals over the last centuries turned these into threatened, rare, and, as a result, poorly studied animals. Further research investigating the individual and collective consequences of contaminant exposure is needed and would help to better understand effects of contaminants on population dynamics and help the resurgence of these large and important animals. To date, only a handful of studies have given mechanistic insights in contaminant response in marine mammals.

Over the last couple of years, we have established alternative approaches to overcome these hurdles through a unique collaboration between marine mammal scientists, environmental chemists, bioinformaticians, and molecular toxicologists. In this project we want to exploit our position at the leading edge of this research to go deeper and wider into the field of marine mammal toxicology.

Furthermore, we want to communicate scientific knowledge about the threats of anthropogenic stressors, with a focus on environmental pollution, to marine mammals to the public and to stakeholders via existing communication platforms (web, social media, conferences, press) and displays at relevant museums and science centers. 

Marma-Detox was introduced in Webinar 1 of the OBON Projects Wave 2025 series – view on YouTube.

While not exclusively focused on marine environments, AM’s marine dataset includes over >9,000 samples (water, sediment, hosts) and describes microbial assemblages in the southern hemisphere from latitudes 0 to 66°S, longitudes 74°E to 174°W, temperatures -1.6 to 31.4°C and water depths 0 to 6,015 m. This dataset combines one-off spatial samples and long-term temporal observations from key locations in Australian shelf waters (e.g., IMOS National Reference Stations), coasts and estuaries, as well as repeated oceanographic transects (e.g., Southern Ocean Time Series, GO-SHIP). These time-series data underpin national-scale monitoring of ocean health, biogeochemistry, and productivity, supporting sites of ecological, economic, and public health significance. AM’s open, collaborative structure and growing capabilities position it as a crucial platform for understanding and managing Australia’s microbial biodiversity.

The Oceania region is often underrepresented in global initiatives and through becoming an Ocean Decade-endorsed project under OBON and connecting with the OBON community we seek to enhance collaboration and contribute this critical regional dataset to OBON’s global network of biomolecular observing capacity.

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of the Australian Microbiome consortium in the generation of data. The Australian Microbiome initiative is supported by funding from Bioplatforms Australia and the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) through the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), Parks Australia through the Bush Blitz program funded by the Australian Government and BHP, and the CSIRO.

While possible for smaller species, it obligates the capture and restraint of these individuals, which can be logistically challenging for researchers, and stressful for the animal. Thus, the most widely used sampling technique for free-ranging cetaceans remains remote tissue biopsying, which is considered invasive, even if minimally, as it causes a small lesion on the animal. Nevertheless, in recent years, novel and promising ways of examining whale health are being developed using cetacean exhaled breath or “blow”, collected non-invasively – from the detection of hormones and other metabolites, microbiological studies, genetic markers to determine sex, species, or individual identification and there is strong potential to be used for the discovery of new biomarkers of health. In human medicine, the potential of microRNAs (miRNAs) as non-invasive biomarkers in biological fluids, including exhaled breath condensates, has been well established20. As such many model species already have miRNAomes available; however, miRNAs have not been carefully studied in wildlife species, including cetaceans. The development of miRNAs as novel non-invasive biomarkers of cetacean physiology could revolutionise the field. BLOWOMICS Thus, aims to: 1) provide a well-defined and characterised miRNAome for different tissues of cetaceans; 2) test the potential of using miRNA biomarkers in cetacean blow to address key knowledge gaps in free-swimming large cetaceans and 3) develop an ʻopen accessʼ database for cetacean miRNA resources to facilitate data sharing and advancements worldwide.