ANTOS Expert Group Report 2022 Popular

Antarctic Near-Shore and Terrestrial Observation System (ANTOS) 2020-22 Report

Joint Expert Group of the Geosciences, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences Groups

Report Author(s): Craig Cary and Vonda Cummings (NZ)

Summary of activities from 2020-22

1. Invited Talks. During the pandemic and series of global lockdowns meetings continued to be held on-line. Members of the committee presented invited talks at four conferences including one seeking to develop a similar system across the sub-Antarctic – Sub-ANTOS.
2. Technical Manual Development – the central spine of ANTOS is to design and install 25 dedicated monitoring nodes in or near per-selected biological sentinel sites. With continued input from ANTOS, Hoskins Scientific (Canada) has developed three scalable monitoring systems (Tier 1-3) for both near-shore and terrestrial deployment and their respective manuals.
3. ANTOS members are developing a proposal for philantropic funding to support the installation of Tier 3 systems in 25 cross continental locations.
4. ANTOS was represented at two US NSF-supported workshops: (a) Developing an Antarctic Biorepository (Jan 2-4, 2022); (b) Developing a submarine fiber optic telecommunications cable from New Zealand to McMurdo Station with terabit-scale networking capability.
5. Research proposals are increasingly including ANTOS systems in their science plans. For example, a proposal submitted to the BelSPO Impuls 2022 call (Verleyen) includes installing a long-term monitoring site in Yûboku Valley incorporated into the ANTOS programme and network.
6. The installation of 25 Tier 3 marine and terrestrial nodes in 25 sentinel sites – is aspirational. ANTOS fully supports the individual researchers and national programs installing smaller systems is areas of interest. ANTOS currently has six Tier one terrestrial (NZ, Italy) and three Tier 2 marine (NZ) systems installed and has written letters to support applications in Italy, Argentina, and Australia to install four Tier 1 and a Tier 3 terrestrial system in designated sentinel sites.
7. Committee members have been invited to attend and participate at five international conferences, symposia, and/or workshops that focus on aspects of monitoring climate change in Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic.