Marine ecosystems are complex and variable networks of interacting organisms that support roughly half of global productivity and play important roles in sustaining global processes, including regulation of climate. Mounting recognition points to the societal value of not just timely information about the status and change of marine ecosystems but how well we can model and predict them. Despite recognition as system-level science, the way specialists and non-specialists think about ecosystems must move from reducing the problem spaces into specialized and finer partitions to a significantly more integrative and predictive one. This research effort brings together computational and information scientists, oceanographers and microbiologists to develop a Marine Biodiversity Virtual Laboratory (MBVL).
