Shovon gave an invited talk on “Ocean remote sensing for modelling and monitoring marine autotrophic biodiversity” at ‘Space – the final frontier for biodiversity monitoring’ Symposium at the Zoological Society of London. This talk was attended by >120 local and international participants, and was widely discussed on the social media.
The microscopic autotrophs in the upper ocean are responsible for almost half of the annual global carbon fixation, and are the basis of marine food webs. However, an accurate estimation of the biomass stocks and biodiversity of these species on a global scale is a non-trivial task. This presentation dealt with some recent developments towards this direction. It included some recently developed methods and models to use ocean colour remote sensing for understanding and monitoring the size-based community structure of marine autotrophic phytoplankton. It further dealt with certain approaches for minimizing the uncertainties in remote-sensing based estimates, particularly, for phytoplankton community structure. These approaches will provide independent estimates of biomass and biodiversity of marine autotrophs from space using remote sensing, which are potentially important for understanding and monitoring the dynamics and diversity of marine ecosystems.