Interface Habitats: An Integrated Observing Strategy for Earth’s Most Dynamic and Consequential Aquatic Boundaries

Susanne Elizabeth Craig , Joaquim Goes, Abishek Kumar, Chintan Kumar, Deepak R Mishra, Carina Poulin, Shaily Rahman, Corrine Rojas, Maria Tzortziou

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Interface Habitats – the dynamic boundaries where water meets land, the seafloor, the atmosphere, and ice, and where fronts, eddies, and filaments draw comparably sharp boundaries within the water itself – are among Earth's most productive, diverse, and rapidly changing ecosystems, and the site of most human interaction with aquatic environments. Coasts, estuaries, deltas, wetlands, coral reefs, kelp forests, seagrass meadows, continental shelves, polar ice edges, and open ocean fronts provide nursery habitat, cycle carbon and nutrients, purify water, and support the fisheries and aquaculture central to a global Blue Economy valued at an estimated $1.5 trillion annually. They are also the most heavily impacted by human activity - pollution, overfishing, coastal development, marine litter and plastics, and harmful algal blooms - even as warming and sea-level rise drive lasting change. This white paper presents the science case and a multi-platform observing strategy for characterizing, understanding, and predicting change in Interface Habitats. No single platform can resolve their spatial heterogeneity, temporal dynamism, and optical complexity. Meeting the challenge requires sustained hyperspectral, high temporal, and high spatial resolution ocean color observations in the Program of Record; operational processing of heritage Landsat- and Sentinel-2-class data; low-cost commercial constellations; an ocean-optimized profiling lidar extended to nearshore, benthic, and ice-edge applications; sustained suborbital and in situ observations; and data fusion and machine learning coupled with mechanistic modeling linking terrestrial, atmospheric, and cryospheric processes to the ocean. We recommend priority investment in each, with the infrastructure, interagency partnerships, and workforce needed to convert these data into decision-relevant products for the communities, resource managers, and policymakers who depend on healthy Interface Habitats.