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Phytoplankton communities residing in the open ocean, the largest habitat on Earth, play a key role in global primary production. Through their influence on nutrient supply to the euphotic zone, open-ocean eddies impact the magnitude of primary production and its spatial and temporal distributions. It is important to gain a deeper understanding of the microbial ecology of marine ecosystems under the influence of eddy physics with the aid of advanced technologies. In March and April 2018, we deployed autonomous underwater and surface vehicles in a cyclonic eddy in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre to investigate the variability of the microbial community in the deep chlorophyll maximum (DCM) layer. One long-range autonomous underwater vehicle (LRAUV) carrying a third-generation Environmental Sample Processor (3G-ESP) autonomously tracked and sampled the DCM layer for four days without surfacing. The sampling LRAUV's vertical position in the DCM layer was maintained by locking onto the isotherm corresponding to the chlorophyll peak. The vehicle ran on tight circles while drifting with the eddy current. This mode of operation enabled a quasi-Lagrangian time series focused on sampling the temporal variation of the DCM population. A companion LRAUV surveyed a cylindrical volume around the sampling LRAUV to monitor Manuscript

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Effective ocean and coastal data management are needed to manage marine ecosystem health. Past ocean and coastal data management systems were often very specific to a particular application and region, but this focused approach often lacks real-time data and sharing/interoperating capability. The challenge for the ocean observing community is to devise standards and practices that enable integration of data from sensors across devices, manufacturers, users, and domains to enable new types of applications and services that facilitate much more comprehensive understanding and analyses of marine ecosystem. A given kind of sensor may be deployed on various platforms such as floats, gliders or moorings, and thus must be integrated with different operation, and data management systems. Simplifying the integration process in existing or newly established observing systems would benefit system operators and is important for the broader application of diverse sensors. This paper describes a geospatial "sensor web" architecture developed by the "NeXOS" project for ocean and coastal data management, based on the concepts of spatial data infrastructure and the Sensor Web Enablement framework of the Open Geospatial Consortium. This approach reduces the effort to propagate data from deployed sensors to users. To support the realization of the proposed Next generation Ocean Sensors (NeXOS) architecture, hardware and software specifications for a Smart Electronic Interface for Sensors and Instruments (SEISI) are described. SEISI specifies small lower-power electronics, minimal operating system, and standards-basedresearch software to enable web-based Manuscript

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