CoAuthors

Cedric Cotté (MNHN, France); Francesco Nencioli (MIO, France)

The understanding of the physical mechanisms that control the distribution of marine species in the open ocean is a challenging and interdisciplinary issue. The limited knowledge of such mechanisms currently hinders our ability to manage marine resources, protect biodiversity, and estimate the impact of natural and anthropogenic environmental changes over the oceanic biota. Altimetry cannot detect directly biological information. However, when opportunely analyzed with Lagrangian techniques and merged with other satellite data, altimetry provides uninterrupted, mesoscale-resolving observations of transport and mixing, which are currently emerging as key drivers in structuring biodiversity and trophic interactions in the open ocean. Lagrangian analyses of real-time altimetry can also be used for supporting in situ experiments with adaptive sampling strategies, focusing the observations on the key dynamical structures or on stations that are representative of large-scale regions.