AqQua
The Aquatic Life Foundation Project: Quantifying Life at Scale in a Changing World

Planned AqQua workflow. Image: Klas Ove Möller
Climate and human well-being depend to a large extent on aquatic life. In particular, organic matter formed by plankton sustainably sequesters vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Climate change alters fish-planktonic food webs, impacting the ocean’s biological carbon pump, as well as marine and freshwater food resources. While the critical role of aquatic life for climate regulation and human nutrition mandates precise mapping and monitoring, the abundance of most species is still unknown and unmonitored to date. Likewise, current estimates of global marine carbon export exhibit vast uncertainties on the same order of magnitude as anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

Examples of pelagic imaging systems and their respective images. Image: Klas Ove Möller
Distributed pelagic imaging techniques enable the sustained observation of aquatic life and its debris, comprehensively covering the earth’s water bodies down to the bottom of the deep sea. Each day, millions of images of plankton and associated environmental data are acquired by researchers around the globe using a variety of devices. Each individual data point provides information about biodiversity, functioning of aquatic foodwebs and ecosystem status of the related water body as well as its role in carbon sequestration. The Aquatic Life Foundation Project (AqQua) will combine billions of images acquired with a variety of devices across the globe and leverage large-scale High Performance Computing to train the first foundational pelagic imaging model. The model will be fine-tuned for species classification, trait extraction and particulate organic carbon estimation in the Foundation Stage, and distilled and deployed to the global community as a resource-efficient, easily usable tool in the Readiness Stage. The Visionary Stage aims at a compositional model that integrates orthogonal modalities such as remote sensing- and environmental data to establish global maps of species biodiversity, ecosystem status, and carbon flux at unprecedented accuracy and granularity, thereby generating a fundamental understanding of marine and freshwater life in times of global change that will serve to aid decision making, in particular with respect to emerging ocean-bound carbon dioxide removal technologies.
Partnerships
AqQua is a Helmholtz Foundation Model Initiative and a joint effort between the Max Delbrück Center, GEOMAR, FZ Jülich and Hereon with contributions by Helmholtz Imaging, Helmholtz AI, UFZ, and AWI.
Contact

Head of Department
Biological Carbon Pump
Phone: +49 (0)4152 87-2371