Collaborative Research: Ideas Lab: Smarter Microbial Observatories for Realtime ExperimentS (SMORES)

Much of the ocean floor is covered with sediments that harbor large communities of animals, microscopic creatures, bacteria and archaea. These communities play a role in natural carbon cycling, yet there is a lot to learn about how this community nourishes the ocean, and stores carbon into deeper sediments. This Ideas Lab: Engineering Technologies to Advance Underwater Sciences (ETAUS) project will develop a new seafloor sensor/sampler system to study how tides affect the seafloor carbon cycle. It will also develop “smarter” control systems to make predictions about when and where to best collect samples. This would be a major improvement over existing approaches that waste battery power and have short deployment times. These advances will also provide broader impacts by providing technologies that can be applied to other sensor sets allowing them to record data for longer periods. The project provides mentoring and field opportunities to high-school and college students from a variety of backgrounds. The team will work with an award-winning filmmaker to produce a short documentary about careers in marine science. This project will develop a novel seafloor sensor/sampler array to better understand how tidal pumping and subsurface currents influence seafloor oxygenation and sedimentary carbon cycling. Equally important, it will develop control systems that use machine-learning models (MLM) to make informed predictions about when and where to best sense and sample based on historical and realtime data. The development of MLM controllers will enhance remote deployment, minimize excess power consumption and decrease the collection of sub-optimal samples. This project is funded jointly by the following NSF Divisions: Electrical, Communications & Cyber Systems, Environmental Biology, Ocean Sciences, and Civil, Mechanical & Manufacturing Innovation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.