The founding charter of the Genomic Observatories Network

Abstract

The co-authors of this paper hereby state their intention to work together to launch the Genomic Observatories Network (GOs Network) for which this document will serve as its Founding Charter. We define a Genomic Observatory as an ecosystem and/or site subject to long-term scientific research, including (but not limited to) the sustained study of genomic biodiversity from single-celled microbes to multicellular organisms.An international group of 64 scientists first published the call for a global network of Genomic Observatories in January 2012. The vision for such a network was expanded in a subsequent paper and developed over a series of meetings in Bremen (Germany), Shenzhen (China), Moorea (French Polynesia), Oxford (UK), Pacific Grove (California, USA), Washington (DC, USA), and London (UK). While this community-building process continues, here we express our mutual intent to establish the GOs Network formally, and to describe our shared vision for its future. The views expressed here are ours alone as individual scientists, and do not necessarily represent those of the institutions with which we are affiliated.

Habitat Heterogeneity and Connectivity: Effects on the Planktonic Protist Community Structure at Two Adjacent Coastal Sites (the Lagoon and the Gulf of Venice, Northern Adriatic Sea, Italy) Revealed by Metabarcoding

“…Long Term Ecological Research sites constitute inspiring places, where long term observations stimulate a wide range of specific research activities (Peters, 2010) that provide, in turn, precious tools for interpreting long term data, thus increasing their informative value (Zingone et al, 2019). This is the case for metabarcoding studies which are particularly valuable at LTER sites, where the existing background ecological knowledge allows optimizing both the arrangement of the molecular research and the interpretation of its results (Davies et al, 2014;Stern et al, 2018).…”

A Response to Scientific and Societal Needs for Marine Biological Observations

“…The initial scoping of the EOV will focus on bacterial and archaeal life; however, the viral and eukaryotic components of the microbiome will also be considered as our expert group grows. Microbial observatories federated through thematic networks such as the Global Omics Observatory Network (GLOMICON) 6 and the Genomic Observatories (GOs) Network (Davies et al, 2014) will be instrumental in this endeavor, as will information infrastructures such as the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC), GBIF (2018) 7 , and OBIS 8 . Multiple workshops over 2018 and 2019 have connected these entities to the Microbial EOV, as well as the IOC-UNESCO Ocean Best Practice System (OPBS; Pearlman et al, this issue) 9 and the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) 10 .…”

Time series and beyond: multifaceted plankton research at a marine Mediterranean LTER site

“…Moon-Van der Staay et al 2001). Yet it has soon been acknowledged that the use of this new powerful tool is maximized at places with a sound background knowledge of the system, which allows for taking full advantage of the new information by integrating it with that deriving from classical methods (Davies et al 2014, Stern et al 2018.…”